


Currents of Silver

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Wednesday One-Shots [10]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Aurors, Muggle world, Multi, Romance, Serial Killers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-03
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-04-18 18:32:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 42,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4716260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry and Severus are dwelling comfortably in both the Muggle and wizarding worlds. When Draco Malfoy comes to them for help in finding a killer who can slip back and forth between the two worlds, complexities from the past flare to life and change the course of their lives as well as Draco’s case.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Another Wednesday one-shot written for fight_wit_pocky’s request: _Harry/Snape/Draco_
> 
> _Harry and Snape are in an established relationship. They live comfortably in both the Wizard and Muggle worlds. Harry works in a office where he is a psychologist to his Muggle clients and a Mind Healer to the Wizard ones. Severus owns a shop that sells both medicines and potions, depending on the customer. Draco, an Auror, comes to them for help with a special case._
> 
> This is a long one-shot—much longer than I initially thought—that will need to be divided into chapters of varying lengths. It should probably be five or six of them long.
> 
> Warnings for angst, violence, gore, minor character deaths, AU (in that Snape lived), non-linear timeline (flashbacks interwoven with the present).

“I—I can hardly believe  _that_ would be all it was.”  
  
Harry settled thoughtfully back into his chair and looked at his patient, Alton Carter, sitting huddled in the other one. Alton studied him as though he expected the words that came out of Harry’s mouth to turn into dragons.  
  
 _That only happened once,_ Harry scolded himself, and focused again on Alton. “All? A tour in a war zone doesn’t sound like ‘all’ to me.”  
  
Alton shifted uneasily and then sighed and rubbed one hand over his tattered jeans. “But—I don’t have PTSD. Not like all my mates do. I don’t have nightmares or flashbacks or anything like that.”  
  
“You had fears severe enough to drive you here,” Harry pointed out. Fears, in fact, severe enough to qualify him for treatment by the “eerie” kind of psychologist.   
  
“ _Crazy_ fears.” Alton turned brick-red, easy for him to do; he looked as if his skin was made of porcelain.   
  
“I told you that you weren’t crazy,” said Harry severely. It had been the first thing he’d had to reassure Alton of. “Believe me, I  _know_ crazy. And just being afraid of the darkness isn’t it.”  
  
“But the darkness under my bed. Like some little  _kid_.”  
  
Harry shook his head. He had got frustrated at first with the way that Alton needed to recite all Harry’s words over and over again, but by now, it was sort of soothing to him as well as Alton. “You said you don’t have nightmares. Dreaming about being drowned because the darkness is rising from under your bed sounds like one to me.”  
  
“I don’t wake up screaming.”  
  
 _You do wake up fighting for your life._ It was that which had finally persuaded Alton to go in for evaluation in the first place, he’d told Harry. He’d almost strangled his wife one night in bed.   
  
“Screaming’s a matter of opinion,” said Harry firmly, and then switched the subject of conversation. He had to alternate with Alton, from talking about his problems to talking about ordinary things. “How is Mercy?”  
  
Alton’s face always brightened and warmed when he talked about his daughter, as if he was standing in a shaft of sunlight. Harry sat back in his chair, smiling, and listened to Mercy’s adventures in primary school, with her friends, and on the roof.  
  
“On the roof of your  _flat_?” Harry broke in, laughing. Alton had never said that Mercy had a particular fascination with heights before.  
  
“Yes.” Alton rolled his eyes, but any attempt at sternness got ruined by the way he was utterly beaming. Harry hoped he was more successful when he had to punish Mercy. “She told me that she didn’t climb the stairs, even. Some wild story about how she was running and tripped and wished to be safe, and suddenly she was up there.”  
  
Harry froze for a second. He didn’t think Alton, who was still chuckling to himself, had noticed. Then he asked, softly, “And does she lie often?”  
  
“Oh, just the childish lies any kid tells.” Alton shrugged. “She didn’t eat the last biscuit. Someone else must have left the soap on the floor. She didn’t change her shoes from blue to red by getting hold of dye, she just wished they would change color and it happened.” He smiled. “She’s five. The world is still a magical place.”  
  
Harry smiled, and didn’t think it looked strained. “You know, I’d like to meet Mercy sometime. Not during one of our regular sessions,” he added hastily, as Alton sat up and looked perceptive. “But outside of it.”  
  
“You don’t think there’s something wrong with  _her_ , too? Just because she lies sometimes—”  
  
“No,” said Harry calmly. “I just think that talking to her and getting her perspective on things would be valuable. It’s amazing how much kids notice.”  
  
Alton thought about it, then nodded. “All right. You have a point, Potter. I’ll bring her along next time, and you can talk without me in the room.” He winked at Harry, although his face had gone back to that expression of anxiety that seemed fixed on it every time he first came in. “Talk to her about the darkness under the bed, too, right?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
 _And about the letter she’s probably going to be getting when she’s eleven,_ Harry thought, as he waved good-bye to Alton. He would have to work more delicately with this than with the few other Muggleborns he’d accidentally noticed or discovered. Her father would need a lot of calming and explanation once he found out magic was real.  
  
Alton had been his last appointment of the day. Harry let himself sit back and be soothed by his own pretty pale blue walls and pictures of flowers before he shook his head, stood up, and went to make sure the doors were secured with both locks and the spells that did most of the actual protection. Walking between the Muggle and wizarding worlds was always interesting, but sometimes twice as much work.  
  
Harry was glad he could throw his cloak back over his shoulders after a day like this and Floo home to Severus. The flames engulfed him as he called out, “Green and Gold Hollow!”, and spat him out on a hearth made of stone in exactly those colors. Harry had got a bit more graceful in the years since Hogwarts, and he managed to step off the hearth without stumbling.  
  
The next second, though, he caught his foot on a potions vial lying on the floor. Severus would remind him that it was only a  _bit_.  
  
Harry snorted, picked up the vial, and hung his cloak on one of the hooks next to the fireplace. Then he followed the trail of vials, crumpled pieces of parchment, pens, pencils, and dust and soot to the door of Severus’s lab. Severus was prone to mix the Muggle and wizarding worlds in his rubbish when he was planning, too, but he never allowed any of it to dirty the lab.  
  
“Severus?” Harry pitched his voice low, capable of being ignored if Severus wanted to. He didn’t need any explanations of what it could mean—sometimes—to disturb someone brewing. The scars in the door above his head were enough. And the scars on the back of one hand, too.  
  
A second after his call, the door of the lab swung inwards, an invitation in itself. Harry stepped in, already half-smiling.   
  
But he stopped short when he saw two figures turn away from the battered pewter cauldron on the nearest table. In a second, Harry fell back into the calm, cool persona he tended to adopt with visitors from the wizarding world who weren’t his patients.  
  
Of course, he couldn’t remember the last time Severus had invited a customer of his own back into their home from his apothecary. But it wouldn’t do to start showing anything too openly.  
  
“Welcome,” Harry said, and extended a hand a little as he swept a bow. It would have looked better with his cloak still on him, but then, he hadn’t known there was anyone else here. “My name is Harry Potter. If you’re here for a private consultation, then I can leave you alone with Severus and let you—”  
  
“Shove it, Potter.” The figure turned further towards him, and Harry nearly swallowed his teeth at the sight of the pale, desperate face, and the grey eyes glittering frenetically, like broken gems.   
  
“Welcome,” Harry said after a minute, “Malfoy.”  
  
He hoped his voice was polite, but couldn’t be sure, since the falcon-like glance Severus shot him could have meant anything. In the meantime, he couldn’t stop staring, because memories had turned and begun to wing their way through his mind in ghostly processions.  
  
*  
  
Harry leaned back against the wall of the hospital wing, so tired that it felt as if his eyelids were going to fall off his face. But he could sleep now. He was sure he had done it this time, and Snape was going to live.  
  
The door of the hospital wing opening still brought him to his feet with his wand in hand, though. While the Hogwarts hospital wing now had protections humming around it in waves of blue and silver, the colors of Harry’s Healing magic, the Aurors hadn’t yet caught the people who’d almost eviscerated Snape. And Harry was no stranger to the technique of sending someone in under the Imperius Curse so protections attuned to frequent visitors would let them through.  
  
It was Malfoy, though. Harry lowered his wand, while he still studied Malfoy in silence. He hadn’t been among the swarm of Aurors who had found Snape or brought him here or questioned him. Harry had thought he hadn’t been assigned to this case.  
  
“Where is he?” Malfoy had hair standing out from his head that looked burned, and a face nearly as pale as Harry’s with lack of sleep, so Harry just nodded to the bed right in front of him instead of mocking Malfoy for not having eyes in his head.  
  
Malfoy closed his eyes and then opened them again, trembling. He moved in, seeming ignorant of Harry’s careful gaze, and rested his hand on the edge of the bed. Snape didn’t move, but slept on.  
  
“Who did this to him?”  
  
Again Harry held back the snap, and the impulse to tell Malfoy that was more his department than Harry’s. “The rest of your lot don’t know yet,” he said. “They thought they might have an answer by tomorrow morning.”  
  
“When I heard the news, I thought—” Malfoy stopped and seemed about to indulge in a slow-motion collapse. Harry Summoned a chair and skidded it over behind Malfoy. Of course, once he realized someone was trying to care for him, Malfoy straightened his back and glared at Harry.  
  
“Yes, he did almost die,” Harry said. “That’s one reason he’s here instead of St. Mungo’s. Waiting to transport him there would have cost him too much time and blood.” He pinched his lips shut in the next instant. The Aurors had found Snape on the edge of the Forbidden Forest as they searched it for both him and some students who had apparently gone missing two days before. It was sheer luck that Harry had been with them trying to use spells to track one of the students, who he’d recently Healed.  
  
Malfoy turned back to Snape. He put out a hand, retracted it, and sat down in the chair at last. Harry grunted and turned to wash his hands. He would have gone to sleep with them bloody, but now that he had other awakened people in the hospital wing, he wouldn’t.  
  
And Malfoy would judge him for it in a way that most of those other people wouldn’t. Harry ignored the prickle down his spine that whispered maybe it wouldn’t happen now with Snape nearby for Malfoy to care for.  
  
Malfoy had never cared enough for Snape to officially  _announce_ it. That was the problem.  
  
Harry cast a few spells that would refresh him on himself. Then he strode over to the Floo to speak to a house-elf. He would have to eat, particularly if he needed to Heal other people. The Aurors were still searching for the missing students.  
  
“Why don’t you tell him?”  
  
It took Harry a long second to realize that Malfoy had said those words to him, instead of the other way around. Then Harry turned slowly, and tried to look casual instead of exhausted as he leaned an elbow on the mantel.  
  
“Excuse me? Tell him what?”   
  
“That you care for him.” Malfoy’s face looked like a skull. As Harry watched, he held his hand out again, then pulled it back again, a little dance he had been conducting with Snape ever since Harry had got to know them both since the war. “I have no idea if he knows, but it’s pathetic, how much you hold back from him.”  
  
Harry felt his lips trembling, and tried to halt what was coming next, because he thought he would look even more pathetic than Malfoy considered him right now. But in the end, he couldn’t make them be still, and he burst out laughing. Not even Snape stirring a little on the bed and rolling over could make him stop.  
  
Malfoy stared at him, and Harry thought he saw the skull beneath coming more and more to the surface every moment. He made no attempt to say anything else, though. He held still, and his rage grew thicker and thicker, filling the room with an invisible cloud.   
  
“All of those words,” Harry finally said, choking a little as he tried to swallow the merriment, “are ones I could have spoken to you.”  
  
“I don’t care for Severus,” Malfoy said, even as his wand fell to the floor and he started back from the bed and the chair as if Harry had sent lightning spinning through him.  
  
Harry sighed. “I almost wish that was true, because it would leave the way open for me.” He continued without allowing Malfoy a chance to respond. “But I can’t compete with the intensity of the relationship you shared during the war, anyway. I don’t really know why  _you_  hold back. You might as well go and take what you want, and what he wants, too, from the way he spoke of you.”  
  
 _There_. Harry had sometimes writhed inside with how ungenerous he was, how much he had wished for Malfoy to fall in love with someone else or just conveniently get sick so that Harry could heroically save his life and then Malfoy, in gratitude, would give up his claim to Snape. Something that would remove the weight from Harry’s mind whenever he thought about Malfoy and Snape.  
  
But he couldn’t get more generous than letting Malfoy know the truth and then standing out of the way. Harry turned and cast powder into the Floo, calling “Hogwarts kitchens!” as he saw Snape starting to stir.   
  
 _Do what you can with the time I’ve given you, Malfoy. It’s not my fault if you don’t use it well._  
  
*  
  
Harry thought it might be his fault, though, when he came back after a full meal and a long talk with Winky to find Snape sitting up in bed, silent, and Malfoy gone.  
  
“None of the other Aurors have come back or brought the missing students in yet?” Harry shook his head as he brushed the soot off his robes.   
  
“They did bring them back.” Snape looked up. “They determined that none of them needed treatment in the hospital wing, though, and so they didn’t call you. It turned out to be—a stupid prank. They dared each other to go into the Forbidden Forest and cast certain spells, and then they found themselves lost. I might as well not have gone after them.” His face wrinkled for a long moment. “Or got myself caught by one of their waiting trap spells they had had another idiotic friend cast to make sure they couldn’t simply run out of the Forest.”  
  
“Oh.” Harry sighed a little as a part of his brain that never relaxed when there were people in trouble seemed to unravel. “That’s good. Much better than I feared.” He nodded at Snape. “And you, Professor?”  
  
“Bloodied, but not broken.” Snape turned and faced him. “And capable of returning to consciousness earlier than you imagined I could. Your Peaceful Sleep Draught was not properly brewed. I heard the whole of your  _fascinating_ conversation with Mr. Malfoy.”  
  
Harry raised his eyebrows. “Sorry?”  
  
“Are you apologizing for the potion or the conversation?” Snape demanded.  
  
“The potion.” Harry held his eyes. “Everything I said to Malfoy was true, and you know it.”  
  
Snape made an irritated motion with his arm. “About his motivations, it may be. Since the war, I have never fathomed his heart.” Harry was still blinking over Severus Snape using the word “heart” seriously when Snape leaned forwards and added, “But you need not presume about  _my_ motivations.”  
  
“Oh,” Harry breathed. He strangled his newborn hope. Things never went the way he wanted immediately. “So you’re not pursuing a relationship with him for your own reasons? Or it’s complicated for some other reason besides the war?”  
  
“Fool,” said Snape. “I will not pursue that which flees me. I had enough of that when I had to pretend to care for the goals of others before my own.” He paused, a flicker in his eyes like a dying fire, and added, “I thought you drew back because of disgust or uncertainty. Now that I find it was to give someone else precedence, permit me to enlighten you. My bond with Draco during the war was not so deep that I cannot form another with someone else, especially seven years later.”  
  
Harry drew his shoulders up and blinked for a second.   
  
“I also do not care for those who pretend to be stupider than they are,” Snape said. “I receive enough of  _that_ in my classes.”  
  
And Harry laughed, and stepped forwards, and began to explain when he had started admiring the way Snape had returned to life and how he had behaved since the war, and Snape listened as though he had never heard anything like it in his life before.  
  
*  
  
“Draco is here for help on a case.”  
  
Harry thought of himself as mysterious, Severus knew. He had been encouraged in the notion by people who surrounded him and gaped at him and analyzed his smallest movement as though it was profound, never understanding the simple principles that drove most of Harry’s actions. Even after plenty of proof that Severus could read him like a Muggle sign, Harry still tried to draw himself back, behind impassive walls.  
  
He was doing it now, hunching his shoulders slightly and giving Draco a smile as stiff as the side of the cauldron. When Severus spoke those words about the case, Harry turned and gaped at him. Draco smoothed a hand down his robes and pretended he was elsewhere.  
  
 _More open than you will ever realize,_ Severus thought at both of them, and continued, “It seems that the Aurors are tracking a killer who knows both the Muggle and the wizarding worlds better than most do. He’s come to us for help in setting up a trap and bait for the killer.”  
  
“Based on a potion?” Harry turned as though he was prepared to acknowledge the existence of the half of the room where Draco stood. “Because I’m not using one of my patients as bait.”  
  
“No one would expect you to,” Severus said, and found that he was turning his head just in time to catch the exasperated eyeroll from Draco. There were times in which he was more similar to Draco, even now.  
  
And there were some ways in which Harry was still a Gryffindor. “Then why does he need the help of both of us, instead of just you?” he asked Severus, and faced Draco fully. “Why not just ask for the potion and be done with it?”  
  
Draco drew himself up. The seven years since Severus had seen him last had done him good, Severus thought. He was a wizard in his mid-thirties now, and had outgrown the lingering traces of his childhood. He stood and moved more confidently, and if Harry hadn’t wound himself so tightly in his shell, he would have felt the soft thrum of magic around Draco. Contained, settled,  _adult_.  
  
Then again, neither Harry nor Draco had ever been rational where the other was concerned, and Draco proceeded to prove it.  
  
“Because it’s not about a potion. It’s about  _observation_. And luring the killer to me with help that only you can provide.” Draco performed the trick of looking down his nose that made Severus sigh under his breath. “We know he targets Mind-Healers. Don’t worry, Potter, we won’t ask you to put any of your precious sheep at risk.”  
  
“I’ll take being a sheepdog over someone who still believes that Muggles are inferior,” Harry said instantly.  
  
Draco turned a deeply unattractive red. Severus moved a hand over and flicked his fingers against the caldron so it rang. Both the others started slightly and looked at him.  
  
“From the case as Draco has described it to me,” Severus told Harry, and let his accents fall in all the right places that only seven years of living with and loving with someone could teach him, “it is serious. Store up the petty insults and fling them at each other  _after_ the case. Perhaps they’ll be soaked in special virulence from your spite then.”  
  
Draco turned redder. Harry only nodded, and then turned and said in an arctic tone, “Won’t you come in and have some dinner? I was just about to start it.”  
  
Draco nodded back. Harry seemed able to feel it, since he certainly didn’t turn to look at it. He departed through the door into the rest of the house instead, his head so high that it made Severus’s neck ache watching.  
  
Once the door swung a little shut, Draco turned immediately to Severus. His voice was low but passionate. “Do we need him to set up this trap? Tell him the minimum amount possible and then arrange the trap. We could always use an illusion of him and leave  _him_ out of it. He’s just the same, Severus. He won’t understand!”  
  
Severus waited. Eventually, the passage of seconds like grains of sand wore away the outer coating of Draco’s self-absorption, and he turned redder. Severus nodded.  
  
“You are talking about something that will endanger his life, at least  _in potentia_. And you speak of leaving him out of it? Lying to him?” Severus shook his head once. “He is not the one who doesn’t understand.”  
  
He preceded Draco into the house, and left the echoes of his last statement behind to ring in Draco’s ears. There was more than one reason for Draco to think about them.  
  
*  
  
“But I was the one you sacrificed everything for. And I never even got the chance to say that I was sorry!”  
  
Severus pushed the cauldron back from him. It wobbled on the edge of the table for a moment, then tipped. Severus watched with a savage satisfaction as the potion poured onto the stone floor and began to eat through it as the liquid combined with some of the scattered belladonna leaves Severus had dropped there earlier.  
  
Draco raised his head with a startled gasp, and then slumped back in his chair. “And now I’ve ruined your  _potion_! Severus, I’m sorry.”  
  
Severus turned and limped sharply towards the back of his quarters. The scars along his neck ached, the way they always did in moments of high emotion.   
  
Ironically, he had entertained Draco’s visit in the first place because he had thought that a twenty-one-year-old, and one skilled enough to be accepted into the Auror program, would be able to explain and explore the complexities of their situation after the war, instead of whining about it. He had been wrong. And he did not think that he should be disappointed in all of his former students who had attained that particular age.  
  
This was Draco’s fault.  
  
Severus drew his wand and gestured. The cupboards flew open, and tea marched out and began preparing itself as the kettle filled with water from his jetted  _Aguamenti_ spell. Severus took the cups himself and slammed them on the counter, delighting in their clang.   
  
“Severus?”  
  
Draco had not been able to help much of what had happened to him in the war, including the Unbreakable Vows his mother and Dumbledore had made Severus swear, and his father’s idiocy, and the punishment that the Dark Lord had laid on him to make up for Lucius’s idiocy. Severus had hoped that, with those weights gone, he would develop into the person that Severus knew he could be.  
  
It had not happened. Instead, Draco had grown more apologetic, but also more absorbed by his self-pity. Convinced no one could ever forgive him, he wearied Severus and others by appearing at their doors, whining about how sorry he was, and then glorying in the feeling he received when they got bored and kicked him out.   
  
Severus was determined to stop that today, at least. He could never force Draco to grow into his full potential, but he might remove one excuse for it.  
  
Draco repeated his name, standing at the entrance to the kitchen. Severus turned and nodded reassuringly at him, which made Draco beam so much he never noticed the small vial Severus withdrew from another drawer or how he added it to the tea.  
  
It was a potion Severus used most of the time only when a reporter or someone who wanted to write an “essay” on his activities during the war pushed their way into Hogwarts. None of them had ever come back.  
  
“Most people don’t even know I can apologize,” Draco was saying, as he stood by the table and rocked softly back and forth on the balls of his feet. “They won’t let me prove myself to them.” He bowed his head and touched his hair as if he was checking to make sure it was still present. “No one wants to listen.”  
  
 _Then why did you get accepted into the Auror program?_ Severus thought, but he knew he would get no answer there, either. Besides, it was hard to speak since the wound to his throat. He could do so, but only haltingly and softly, and Draco was in no mood to listen to either kind of speech.  
  
“No one just understands what it’s like, wanting to apologize and having no one accept your apology.” Draco picked up the doctored cup of tea and tilted his head back to throw the hot liquid down his throat. “No one—”  
  
The potion took effect at once, because Severus had never been one to wait on idiocy when he need not. A second later, Draco clutched at his throat and wheezed. Then he dropped to his knees on the floor, choking.  
  
The sounds were soft, and Severus judged it a good time to speak. “I have long forgiven you, Draco.”  
  
Draco looked up at him, and then touched his throat. Severus nodded.   
  
“The sensation like a boulder in your throat will fade in half an hour. You cannot dispel it by means of magic, so don’t try,” Severus added, seeing Draco reach for the hawthorn wand up his sleeve. “And now, I will speak to you of the  _real_ waste of your life.”  
  
Draco seemed to have discovered that he couldn’t cough anything up, but that didn’t prevent him from trying. Severus moved forwards until he was almost standing on the boy’s hand before Draco bothered to pay attention to him.  
  
“The real waste,” Severus whispered, “is that you have made no attempt to live and grow past the war. You do not even know what is important. You are an Auror trainee, but I never hear you talk about that. Your father is in prison, but that forms no part of your list of tragedies. You have few or no friends, but you are not smart enough to attribute their non-existence to your own actions.” Severus paused to take a wheezing breath.  _He_ would have trouble breathing if he spoke too long.  
  
Draco stared up at him. He had forgotten about wheezing himself, Severus was glad to see. He simply had his hands laid on the hollow of his throat and his shoulders. As Severus watched, his shoulders shook a little.  
  
Severus met his eyes, and held them. He made his voice sharp, short, passionate. “I once wanted to save your life partially because I wanted to see the kind of man you could grow into. It doesn’t seem as though you  _have_ chosen to grow.”  
  
Draco stood up and began to back away. Severus watched him. Draco reached the door and fumbled backwards for the knob, never taking his eyes off Severus.  
  
In the end, he bolted out of the school and was gone, leaving Severus to clean up the tea, the spilled potion, and the remains of his patience.   
  
Draco was much younger than he was. Perhaps getting angry at him was as childish as Draco’s refusal to see that the world had changed around him.  
  
But Severus had begun to think that, angry or not, he would never change anything about Draco, so he might as well do what would make  _him_  most comfortable.  
  
*  
  
“Meat?”  
  
“Don’t mind if I do.”  
  
“Potatoes?”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
Severus didn’t put his hand over his eyes, but only because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Draco and Harry seemed to think they were being subtle, making constant table-talk to each other. Or that someone who watched them would be fooled.  
  
Someone might be if they were running a fever, dazed from a blow on the head, and currently suffering from a Confundus Charm. And even then, Severus thought, leaning back to survey the man who was his lover and the one who might have been, that hypothetical person would have to be blind in one eye.  
  
Harry served with exquisite politeness, still drawn back into that cold cocoon he tended to take up around anyone from the wizarding world who didn’t come as a patient. Severus and his friends were exceptions, but Harry had discovered that too many apparently casual visitors and well-wishers only wanted a glimpse of him or Severus, or had some grudge, or wanted to persuade them to donate to a charity. The coldness chased them off.  
  
Not Draco, of course. The little he’d told Severus about the case before Harry came home had been enough to make Severus understand why Draco would pursue it so tenaciously—though not necessarily why he was the lead Auror on a case that so involved the Muggle world. Draco had started when Harry flicked the light switch in the wall. He hadn’t adapted at all in the last seven years.  
  
And he still looked at Severus now and then with a mute pleading, before looking away, that made Severus’s throat tighten. Severus touched the old scars for a moment, however, and shook his head.  
  
He valued what he had built with Harry. He could have had something of exciting richness and strength with Draco, too, but Draco had finally lacked the courage to come to Severus and join him in that journey. Harry had made the choice.  
  
From the gleam of contempt in Harry’s eyes when they cut across Draco’s face, it was for the past insult to Severus that Harry most blamed him. Severus wished there was a way to discreetly tell Harry that he need not be angry on Severus’s behalf.  
  
The courteous meal finally finished, and Harry leaned back in his chair as obediently bobbing bowls of ice cream came out of the kitchen. “What’s this case that you wanted us to look at, Malfoy?”  
  
It was an excuse to speak, and Draco seemed to seize it gratefully. He grabbed up a thick sheaf of parchment from inside his cloak and laid it on the table, then moved it a second before the bowl of ice cream thumped down where he had started to put it.  
  
 _Harry_ , Severus said, with his glance and the turn of his head. Harry nodded and leaned back a little, and watched with pretended calm as Draco removed the constricting spell from the sheaf.  
  
“We’re calling this the Argent Case, right now.” Draco’s voice was low and exhausted as he spoke the words. “The only reason we started realizing the murders were linked was the band of silver around the upper left forearm of each victim.”  
  
“The upper left forearm?” Harry asked.  
  
 _People are dying,_ Severus said, with the way he curled his fingers into Harry’s leg under the table.  _Leave the ancient grudge alone for now._  
  
Harry subsided just as Draco glanced at him with his own slow fire kindling in his eyes. “ _Yes_ ,” he said. “And we did check any possible Death Eater connections, and got nothing. All of the victims are half-bloods with strong Muggle ties or Muggleborns, anyway. Not the sort the Dark Lord would have taken under his charge.” He ignored, graciously enough, the mutter from Harry about the Dark Lord’s  _real_ name. “Or Muggles.”  
  
Severus sat up. “That’s the reason you came to us?”  
  
“Yes.” Draco made the sensible decision to focus only on Severus for right now, leaning as close and speaking as softly as he had when they were alone in the lab. “We don’t understand it. It took us ages to start learning about the Muggles who had died, in remote places all over the country, with those same silver bands. And it made us realize that this killer is hunting more places than we ever thought.”  
  
“He goes after Mind-Healers, you say?”  
  
Severus started. Harry’s voice had shattered the fragile atmosphere he and Draco had built up between themselves without Severus’s even realizing it.  
  
Draco sat back, and wrapped himself in a calm, frigid cloak that he actually seemed to clasp at his throat with a small motion of his hand. “Yes,” he said. “Not all, but a significant portion, of the victims with ties to the wizarding world have been Mind-Healers.”  
  
Severus glanced at Harry sidelong. He had magic fluttering around him in the way Draco had once had. But while Draco’s had come from the almost constant stress he’d lived under during the war, Harry’s usually only stirred in moments of extreme agitation.  
  
“And the Muggles?” Harry pushed ahead tensely. “Is it possible that any of them had seen Mind-Healers?”  
  
“They were  _Muggles,_ Potter,” Draco said. “Of the absolute worst—I mean,  _blameless_ kind. They had no magical relatives. They weren’t connected to any of the wizards killed. We wouldn’t have thought the cases were related at all if not for the silver bands.”  
  
“But did they go to psychologists who might have been Mind-Healers?” Harry asked softly. “Or had Mind-Healer training?”  
  
Draco’s mouth fell open a little. Severus held back a smug chuckle. He wasn’t sure who he would have been laughing at, anyway.  
  
“Shit,” Draco breathed. “That’s a connection we never thought to check.”  
  
“It would be difficult to check if the people they visited were wizards who had cut ties,” Harry said, standing and picking up his bowl of ice cream. He hadn’t eaten any of it, Severus saw. “Muggleborns who vanished back into the Muggle world the minute they were done with Hogwarts, for example. But I suggest you look into it.” He glided back into the kitchen.  
  
Draco wrote a few excited notes down, then sat back and shook his head at Severus. “He could have come up with that earlier.”  
  
“Without information?” Severus let his voice climb the notch from “surprised curiosity” to “exasperated rhetorical question.”  
  
Draco flinched for old time’s sake, and then said, “He was the best, you know. That’s what they said in Auror training, before he quit to become a Healer. He could have done a lot more than he did.”  
  
“Harry is content with the path he’s chosen,” Severus said temperately, while he felt as if he’d swallowed a whole glass of lemonade unexpectedly.  _That_ was a cause for bitterness he had never known lay between Harry and Draco. “And he gave up on being an Auror almost ten years ago. You can’t hold out hope he would choose to go back now?”  
  
“If he’d chosen to stay, those people might not have died.”  
  
Severus rose. “I trust you are wiser than to say that to  _him_ ,” he snapped, and made to follow Harry.  
  
“Severus.”  
  
There were tones and shadings in Draco’s voice that Severus had never thought to hear there, and that was the only reason he paused, reluctantly, and looked back. Draco held out an appealing hand to him. Severus grimaced, and waited.  
  
“This case is horrible,” Draco whispered. “These  _cases_ are horrible. Do you know how this killer murders them? He uses the Entrail-Expelling Curse and then stuffs their mouths full of their own intestines and wraps them around the bodies and bathes them in blood. It’s  _sickening_. And I’ve had to look at almost twenty of these bodies.”  
  
Severus closed his eyes for a second. “You have another link between the killings besides the silver bands, then,” he said.  
  
“Yes.”   
  
Draco’s voice was dragging, reluctant. But Severus could not give him the absolution or the connection he was looking for. He’d had the chance to claim that, and had chosen to give it up.  
  
“We will give you what help we can,” Severus said. Then he opened his eyes and pinned Draco with the kind of gaze Draco had once known better than to mistake. “But I would suggest that you  _do not_ try to guilt Harry into offering you help you think he should have given you months ago.”  
  
“Look at the way he said something useful within the first five minutes, though. If he’d  _been_ there—”  
  
Severus turned around and left. It seemed there were some things that Draco Malfoy, still, would never understand.


	2. Part Two

Draco held his temper and his tongue until he was alone in the bedroom that Severus and Potter had decided he was worthy of. Then he sat down hard on the bed and turned his face to the wall.   
  
He had built a reputation as a worthy Auror, not necessarily the cleverest but the most dogged. He always followed his prey closely and brought them in with a minimum of lives lost. The others would never like him, but they respected him. No one whispered words like “Death Eater” anymore when Draco walked by.  
  
But a few moments in Potter’s presence and he was reduced to a child again.  
  
Draco reached down to take his boots off, carefully blanking his mind and relaxing his breathing. He had learned that first from Bellatrix when she taught him Occlumency, and added to it since through constant meditation practice. He looked around the room, allowing his senses to feast on the unfamiliar place while keeping his thoughts in abeyance.  
  
The room had simple wooden walls, unadorned except for the pictures, four total. Above the door hung a small, clumsily stitched representation of sailing ships on a sea. Draco snorted. He was sure that was a gift from one of the Weasleys. Not only was it clumsy, no one else would think of  _knitting_ a picture.  
  
On the far side of the bed was an enormous painting that came down almost to the floor. No matter how he looked at it, Draco couldn’t understand what it was meant to be. It only resembled an abstract swirl of green and purple. Probably Muggle.  
  
On the wall opposite from the bed was the only painting in the room Draco was prepared to admire.  _Prepared_ to admire, which didn’t mean he would. It showed a dusky green clearing in a wood, and something just preparing to step into it from the shadows. The thing had a long black leg that ended in a cloven hoof. Draco could admire the restraint and skill shown there.  
  
He hadn’t decided if he should yet.  
  
Above the bed was yet a fourth picture, this one a tiresome vase of purple flowers with a pair of glasses lying next to it. Draco had seen those things before in Muggleborn homes, and knew they were called still lifes. A pathetic Muggle attempt to portray the life that  _real_ wizarding paintings and portraits had instinctively.  
  
Then there was a small end table next to the bed, and a chair with a knitted red blanket on it in the corner, and a window that Draco spelled firmly shut. He had no desire to look out into the enchanted view of a Muggle cityscape that Potter and Severus seemed to prefer.  
  
Draco sighed. His attempt to calm himself down was shot once he began noticing how shoddy everything was. He reclined back on the bed and carefully stretched out his arms, then his legs. It would have to take the place of his usual training exercises. He had no room here for the precise turns, spins, and kicks that would have kept his muscles in good shape. Besides, too many thumps and he would probably make Potter stomp in and demand to know what he was doing.  
  
Draco sighed and rolled slowly over on his side as he stuck one arm above his head and stretched it to his fullest extent. The minute he’d solved the Argent case and had the killer safely in hand, he planned to retreat from the Muggle world and leave Severus and Potter to enjoy it.  
  
He could forget the little flares—like heartburn—that happened every time he saw Severus. He could forget the last moments—like wasp stings—that he’d interacted with Potter.  
  
In one way, it would have been fitting if the last time Draco had seen him before this was at Severus’s bedside in Hogwarts. It was after that that Severus and Potter had become lovers, and Draco had felt the burning hope in him turn to a thin wisp of smoke.  
  
But there had been one other time.  
  
*  
  
Draco leaned against the stone wall and breathed as softly as he could. He had learned that the creature tracking him could hear remarkably well.  
  
A rattling hiss sounded from down the corridor. Draco froze at once, one hand clutching at the stone wall and the other on his wand.  
  
Perhaps going into the magically-appearing forest at the edge of Hogsmeade so he could investigate the rumors of the monster and the labyrinth at the center hadn’t been such a smart idea after all.  
  
Instincts and training combined to gang up on him, and Draco ducked and rolled on the floor just as a heavy, clawed black paw smashed the wall above his head. It was coming from  _inside_ the wall. Draco swore as he scrambled to his feet. He might as well make all the noise he liked now. The bloody thing knew where he was.  
  
The creature heaved itself out of the remains of the wall as Draco stood at bay, calling up the strongest Shield Charms he knew. The beast resembled a cat as far as its legs went, but there the resemblance ended. The heavy head was a goat’s, with blazing golden eyes and curling horns, and the neck was a swan’s. Draco hadn’t known that when he first faced it, and the thing had got in a few lucky bites from the way it could twist.  
  
The body that overlapped the legs and ran from the neck to the tail was a turtle’s heavy shell. None of Draco’s strikes had managed to dent that. And the tail was a snapping scorpion’s stinger. Draco swore again.  
  
Couldn’t the Dark wizards obey the Experimental Breeding Ban? Just  _once_?  
  
The creature crouched low when it saw him. Draco wearily prepared himself for another charge. He had so far managed to keep the creature from stinging him or ramming him with its horns, but he knew his luck couldn’t last much longer.  
  
Then a spell he didn’t recognize darted down the corridor, curled  _around_ the corner, and stung the creature in one golden eye. The beast tilted its head back with a roar of agony and then whirled around—Draco ducked its tail and one leg—to stare towards where the spell had come from.  
  
“You! Ugly! Yeah,  _you_.”  
  
Draco wanted to put one hand over his eyes. He knew that voice. He didn’t know what it was  _doing_ here, but that was another matter.  
  
The creature made a surprised, grunting sound. Draco peered bleakly around the thing’s legs, and saw Harry Potter stroll around the corner his spell had come from. He was swirling his wand. A ribbon of color trailed it.  
  
Draco felt his eyes widen. He recognized  _that_ spell, but he couldn’t believe Potter would use it in close quarters.  
  
Then again, it was  _Potter_ , and Potter did crazy things.  
  
“Yeah,” Potter said to the creature, which was concentrating so intently on Potter that it didn’t seem to notice Draco now. “I said you. You’re  _ugly_.” He gave the word a twist that made Draco immediately suspect it was the key word of a Compulsion Charm.  
  
Draco hadn’t known those could work on animals, but maybe the creature being magical was enough to make it work. The goat head roared, and then the creature twisted its neck and snapped at Potter the way it had with Draco. Draco winced. The mouth was more like a beak, and he could tell it was aiming to break Potter’s wand in half.  
  
Potter leaped nimbly aside, not seeming to care that he dashed himself against the wall and the creature’s front leg. Then he ducked under the taloned slash that that paw tried to give him, and leaped. Some magic carried him up until he landed in the middle of the creature’s back.  
  
The beast tried to sting him without seeing him, and then gave a bleating roar of agony. Draco wasn’t sure what had happened, but he thought it likely that the beast had stung itself in the back of the neck.  
  
His feelings rocked towards hope. He would never have tried such a thing, but if the creature was vulnerable to its own poison—  
  
He didn’t get the chance to find out if it was or not. The creature began dancing madly, trying to crush Draco under its paws, and Draco had to hurtle forwards and down and under. He didn’t know how he did it himself, only that he was in safety and turning to fire a Blasting Curse at the beast’s underbelly. He hadn’t really tried that before. Maybe it would be more vulnerable than the turtle shell itself.  
  
“That’s the way to do it!”  
  
Draco nearly didn’t cast the spell. Potter had vaulted down from the creature’s back again, and had spun to look at Draco. His eyes blazed in a way that made it clear he was dancing on the mad edge of exhilaration.  
  
But then Potter waved his arms and yelled like he was trying to scare a bull into running, and Draco decided that meant it would be a good idea to cast.  
  
His Blasting Curse hit the creature’s underbelly and lifted it strongly enough to smash into the ceiling. Draco stared. He hadn’t cast that hard. He didn’t know if a single person  _could_ cast that hard. He glanced instinctively at Potter.  
  
Potter nodded and winked, and Draco decided  _that_ meant he’d cast at the same time. Then he ran towards Draco, and Draco got the hint and whisked away with him down one of the labyrinth’s tunnels.  
  
Potter turned and twisted in seemingly random directions, but given that Draco didn’t have any better idea of where to go, he willingly kept up with him. At least Potter didn’t seem to be leading him down any dead ends.  
  
And behind them, the corridor was quiet. The beast’s bleating had faded. It didn’t sound inclined to come after them anymore.  
  
Potter abruptly stopped, cocked his head to the side for a minute, and cast a sudden spell at the wall. Draco leaped back as the stone turned to mud and rained down on his head, but Potter’s hand was on his arm, steadily pulling him out of the way and up to the surface. Draco spluttered and choked as mud got into his mouth, though.  
  
A spell of his own cleared that, but didn’t do anything about his hair. Draco felt Potter’s wand moving over him, cleaning the mud there and then checking him for injuries with what Draco recognized as diagnostic spells. Draco leaned on the stump of a tree and stared around.  
  
The magically-appearing forest was smoldering around him. Sometime between when he’d entered the labyrinth and now, someone had set a ton of the trees on fire.  
  
“Your doing?” he asked Potter.  
  
“Shhh.”  
  
Draco opened his mouth to say that he didn’t need to be quiet, he was totally fine, and then yelped. There was a sudden slice of pain down his collarbone, and when he glanced to the side, he saw the mark of the beast’s claws there. One of the talons on the outer side of the paw must have caught him, and the adrenaline hadn’t let him feel it until now. He winced as Potter gently sealed it up and then cast another charm Draco knew was one to ward off infection.  
  
“There.” Potter stepped back and smiled at him. “I can’t find any other wounds or broken bones. You’re damn good at what you do, Auror Malfoy.” He gave Draco a small salute of the kind Aurors often exchanged, although not always with Draco.  
  
Draco blinked and pulled himself slowly up off the stump. He had thought Potter was going to say Draco was lucky. “What happened to the forest?”  
  
“It started burning about half an hour after you went in.” Potter frowned and shook his head. “I was here visiting Honeydukes, and someone mentioned that you’d gone that way, and they thought a few people from the village might have wandered in, too. So I went in to see if anyone needed help.”  
  
Draco bristled a little. “You didn’t think I was competent to handle it on my own?”  
  
“Strangely,” Potter said, “I don’t think magical forests that start burning on their own are part of the standard Auror training class.”  
  
Draco wanted to agree, but his pride was still stung. “You didn’t need to rescue me.”  
  
“No,” said Potter. “I wanted to.”  
  
Draco stared. Potter stared back. It was so obvious that he wouldn’t let Draco say the right thing or believe his words in the right way that Draco found himself falling back on another source of outrage.  
  
“I thought you’d left the Aurors because you weren’t good at it,” he said. “Battle or something, other than against the Dark Lord.” Potter’s mouth curled a little, and that was another reason for Draco to distrust and dislike him, because he obviously despised Draco for being afraid of a name he’d always been taught to be afraid of. “But you were wonderful in there. How could you have left?”  
  
“Being good at something doesn’t mean liking it.”  
  
The words were soft enough that Draco would have tried to question them in someone else, but he didn’t care that much about Potter’s reasons. “Do you know how many more cases we could have solved if you’d stayed? How many lives we would have saved?”  
  
Potter abruptly stalked straight up to him. Draco drew his wand, tired and panting though he was. Humiliatingly, Potter didn’t even pay attention to it. He simply leaned forwards until his nose was pressed against Draco’s.  
  
“How many lives would they have lost if I hadn’t become a Healer?” he whispered. “How many other people would have died because another Healer couldn’t close their wounds or recognize their condition in time? I’m good at being a Healer,  _and_ I like it,  _and_ going against the rules is sometimes encouraged because death and disease don’t always play fair. I would never have fit in among the Aurors, not for long. Don’t act like your insecurity is my fault.”  
  
Draco stared with his mouth open. Then he snapped it shut and shoved Potter.  
  
Of course, the bastard had to be graceful enough on his feet that he only rolled back and came up without falling. But now his eyes were quiet and malevolent and he turned away without speaking, walking back towards Hogsmeade.  
  
“You haven’t told me what happened to the other villagers!” Draco yelled after him.  
  
“Find out for yourself.” Potter didn’t look over his shoulder or slow down.  
  
Left alone in the middle of the burned forest with the mysterious stone labyrinth under his feet and his chest hurting far more than his collarbone, Draco snarled and cast a Chain Lightning Charm at the ground, by way of relieving his feelings. He was almost happy when it shocked his toes a little.  
  
 _Fucking Potter._  
  
*  
  
Now, in the back room of Severus and Potter’s home that they so obviously kept for unwanted guests—why stick all these paintings that no one in their right mind could love here, otherwise?—Draco opened his eyes and slowly surfaced. His meditation hadn’t accomplished exactly what he wanted it to, in that he was still tense.  
  
But thinking about it, he could still use that. He could sleep this way, since he’d had practice in high-stakes situations like waiting to ambush a smuggler, and he could use it to make his mind sharper as he pursued this case in the Muggle world.  
  
After all, the sharper he was about capturing the Argent killer, the sooner he could leave the man who irritated him most and the man he could have had, and go back to the world that actually respected him.  
  
*  
  
Harry grimaced and picked up the sheaf of parchment that Malfoy had brought along on the case. It had been sitting in the middle of the kitchen table this morning. Severus had been the only one there, sipping his morning hot chocolate from a small cup and staring remotely off into the distance.  
  
Harry knew what that meant. This little tableau had been arranged for his benefit. The case was here, but Malfoy wasn’t.  
  
And yes, he was going to look at it, Harry thought, darting a quick glance at Severus and then separating the sheets. But that didn’t mean he was going to use himself or his patients as bait for the killer, which seemed to be what Malfoy was angling for.  
  
The case itself had gruesome enough descriptions that Harry was soon flinching and giving up any plans to eat that morning. The photographs he put into their own little pile over to the side; they were all so similar that they didn’t really tell him anything, and so disgusting that he was in danger of vomiting already.   
  
The descriptions of the cases themselves made Harry shake his head. He didn’t even know he was doing it until Severus murmured, “Is there a problem? Did Mr. Malfoy leave something out?”  
  
“He wasn’t the one who did,” Harry said absently, and turned over the sheet he was reading to look at the back. Yes, there was the briefest description of the room where the dead girl had been found, and it made him sigh. “Whoever was working these cases before just didn’t put down enough information about the place. That was where I—well, where I thought one of the connections might be. But if there was any kind of evidence in the murder sites, or reasons why the killer chose these places, it didn’t get written down.”  
  
“Hmmm.”  
  
Harry didn’t look up. He knew what he would say, and Severus’s eyes had too much effect on him in this kind of mood. Instead, he continued reading the descriptions.  
  
The only benefit from the wizards who worked the case not knowing about the Muggle victims until later was that they had more carefully described them, because there were all sorts of things that stood out to them in a Muggle environment which might not in the wizarding world. But still. People had died outside—or been found there—and in their bedrooms, in alleys, near the wizarding world and far from it, in London and little villages. The places didn’t make a good connection, either. And they were all different ages, both male and female, although only a few children.  
  
Harry had been trained to spot patterns, working as both an Auror and a Healer, but this case seemed to have only the silver bands. The photographs of those were no good, either. Harry cast spells that enlarged the photos, and they showed only complete, blank metal, with no etchings or letters or anything like that.   
  
And while there was a link and a similarity between the victims in that the killer had always put the silver bands around their upper left forearms, that became a dead end when it was such a  _plain_ clue.  
  
Harry, almost desperate, shuffled through the parchment again and began writing names down. He at least wanted to know those, and maybe—possibly—he could spot connections between last names that Aurors might have missed, although he really, really doubted that. There was the faint chance that murdered Muggles might be related to Muggleborns who had changed their names on deciding to stay in the wizarding world, but that was one thing he  _did_ trust Malfoy to have investigated thoroughly.  
  
 _Hailey Fortune. Abilene Orell. Rhonda Roades. Russell Young…_  
  
Harry filled most of a page with them, side-by-side. He stared. Then he shook his head and began to list them down the page.   
  
And then,  _then_ he froze.  
  
“What is it?”  
  
 _Give Severus that much justice,_ Harry thought, and licked his dry lips.  _Even when he thinks that I’m doing something wrong and should give Malfoy more of a chance, he recognizes me being afraid._  
  
“Look at this,” he whispered, and pointed to the list of names as they marched down the page.  
  
Severus came to look over his shoulder. He saw it as soon as Harry did: the message that the names spelled if listed down the page, via the first letters of the victims’ first and last names.  
  
HARRY POTTER I AM COMING FOR YOU BE READY FOR ME NO  
  
Harry leaned back, breathing so fast that it felt as if he’d been running a race. But he reached over his shoulder and found Severus’s hand waiting for his clasp, and that was enough for the moment.  
  
“I’m still not going to allow him to put any of my patients in danger,” Harry said after a moment.  
  
“Of course not.”  
  
Harry closed his eyes. That cool certainty was what he had fallen in love with, ages ago, back when he had still thought that he could be an Auror trainee.  
  
*  
  
There was never a good time to visit Severus Snape, not the impatient man who had survived Nagini’s bite, but Harry thought this moment was  _particularly_ bad.  
  
He had come to Snape’s isolated little house on the outskirts of a Bulgarian forest because the Auror Department was still obsessed with uncovering how he’d managed to survive Nagini’s death, and because Snape wasn’t in his usual haunts. The Aurors thought he must have invented some great antivenin, and they wanted it thanks to the development of a new spell that imitated a poisonous snake bite.  
  
That Snape had told no one how he’d survived Nagini, and that he was unlikely to reveal it to Harry if he did decide to tell someone, didn’t seem to matter to the Aurors, Harry thought bitterly. He’d rapped on the door several times now, and he’d finally leaned forwards and peered through one of the gloomy little windows, using his wand to create a small hole in its protective enchantments large enough for one eye.  
  
The interior of the house didn’t look much like a lab, the way Harry had thought it would. It had a lot of couches and tables and benches instead, and Snape was standing in front of the tallest table, staring intently down at something on it. Something long and thin and—  
  
Harry nearly went over and hammered the door down again. Snape had a  _person_ chained on his table!  
  
But even as Harry watched, the person’s hands flailed up and then came down again, bound by the chains, and a long, chilling howl drifted up from its throat. Harry swallowed and slowly eased back from his crouch.  
  
He didn’t know how, since it was full daylight and not full moon, but somehow Snape had engineered a werewolf transformation on that table.  
  
Harry paced back and forth outside the house, waiting for Snape to finish his experiment. But long minutes passed, and nothing happened, not even another howl. At last Harry’s curiosity got the better of him and he went to the window and put his eye to the hole.  
  
There was an eye looking back at him.  
  
Harry jumped away, swearing, and slipped awkwardly in the snow. His arse came down on the ground with a crunch that was only comforting in one way: Harry was sure Snape would have heard  _that_.  
  
The door to the little house opened. Harry rolled onto one knee, ready to meet anything from a charging werewolf to a tirade of collected scorn from Snape.  
  
But Snape only stood there and looked at him without speaking for some moments. Then he nodded, as if he had expected Harry, and moved aside. “You had better come in,” he said, in the deep voice he’d had since Nagini.  
  
Harry trod cautiously inside, looking around. He saw the same tables and benches as before, but no sign of the werewolf.   
  
He turned to Snape, thinking he might as well get the embarrassing part of the business over quickly so he could return to London. “The Aurors wanted me to ask you,” he began.  
  
But someone moved over to the side, and Harry leaped and turned around like a cat. He could feel Snape watching him in amusement, but he didn’t actually care. He should have sensed that someone else was in the room  _at once._ He’d thought his training was at least good enough for that.  
  
Then he realized the person was harmless, or at least looked like it, a tall man in a long red robe. He had shaggy dark hair and brown eyes that blinked continuously, as if he’d just woken up. He yawned at Harry and glanced at Snape.  
  
“Sorry,” said Harry. “I wouldn’t have intruded if I’d realized you had a guest.”  
  
“No,” said Snape. “You would only have spied at the window.”  
  
Harry started to snap something else, but the man turned his head and smiled at Snape, and Harry saw the amber gleam to his eyes. It wasn’t much, just a short catch that was there and then not there, but it still made Harry realize something.  
  
 _That_ was  _the werewolf. He made him transform and then turned him back again. How?_  
  
The man turned to Harry and held out his hand. “Ernest Glover.”  
  
“Harry Potter,” Harry said, and was impressed when the man’s eyes didn’t widen and he didn’t start blubbering something about what an honor it was to meet Harry. Then again, Glover’s English had a bit of an accent. Maybe he didn’t come from a country where they knew much about Harry Potter.  
  
“I was going,” Glover murmured. “I think I’m well enough for the Apparition, and I wouldn’t want to keep you from your appointment with Sir Severus.” He smiled at Snape again.  
  
Snape, astonishingly, turned and loomed over the man with his eyes narrowed. “You won’t Apparate right now and ruin all my hard work,” he said. “You know that the residue on your skin might interact badly with magic for at least two hours.”  
  
“But I feel so much better!”  
  
Harry thought privately that Glover didn’t look in condition to be Apparating anywhere. Snape seemed to think the same thing, because his face took on the harsh lines Harry remembered so well.  
  
“Who is the Potions brewer who just cured you of lycanthropy?” Snape whispered harshly.  
  
Harry sat down. He missed the bench just behind him and the plain wooden couch off to the side and simply dropped straight to his arse on the floor. Neither Snape nor Glover seemed to pay the slightest bit of attention to him.  
  
“That’s why I want to go home!” Glover argued. “To let them all see me—to let Natasha know—”  
  
“And then you will end up not a werewolf, but Splinched,” said Snape, and managed to make his loom more ominous without moving. “I will  _not_ allow my work to go to waste. No.”  
  
Glover frowned, but even that seemed softer and more dazed than it should have been. Of course, Harry thought, his head whirling, if he had just gone through transforming into a werewolf and then had that be his last-ever transformation, he  _would_ be dazed. Glover finally sat down on a bench and pulled the robe around him with a martyred sigh.  
  
Snape turned to Harry with a small smirk. Harry was sure that him revealing he had a werewolf cure was on purpose. He could easily have made up some other lie to tell in front of Harry if he’d wanted to.  
  
“When did you develop this?” Harry asked. “Do people know about it? How soon can you market the potion?’  
  
“It is not a potion,” Snape said. “Or not entirely. It involves a procedure and a ritual, and I can only cure one person at a time. So far, Ernest is only the third one who has trusted me to conduct the ritual.” He threw a proprietary glance at Glover.  
  
Harry nodded slowly. He could suppose that, if the ritual was painful, it wouldn’t matter how much the person in question trusted Snape; there would still be plenty of people reluctant to undergo it. And for some werewolves, maybe the pain they knew was the better choice.  
  
Snape leaned back with his arms folded and studied Glover. The coolness in his eyes didn’t match the sharp way that he watched every movement Glover made, and how he swung his hands between his knees.   
  
Snape, who hated werewolves, had decided to treat them.  
  
Harry wasn’t naïve. He didn’t think Snape had decided to do it out of the goodness of his heart, and the way he watched Glover might have as much to do with concern about his professional reputation as concern about the man’s safety. But still, he had undertaken a great deal of difficult and dangerous research that would mostly benefit magical creatures  _and_ human beings he had no reason to care for.  
  
It was—strange, Harry thought, staring down the length of his wand, and thinking about how reluctant he’d been to come here on the Auror Department’s behalf. Even if he didn’t like Snape, even if he simply wished that Snape would tell them the truth and make them go away and stop assigning Harry this mission.  
  
He had suspected for a while that he didn’t want to be an Auror, but what else was he going to do? There was no other career half so suited to him, no other career that would let him help that many people.  
  
Then Harry paused.  
  
 _That’s a little ridiculous, isn’t it? Snape managed to help people, and he focuses on potions and research. And rituals, apparently._  
  
Harry turned the idea over in his mind. Of course, helping people escape from criminals or take their revenge was one way of doing it. He had never doubted that even when he began to dread going to training or rolled his eyes in private at the self-importance of some of their Auror instructors.  
  
But what other ways could he do it? Give people happiness, the way Snape had Glover? Ease their lives?  
  
“Potter. What did you want to talk to me about?”  
  
Harry started and looked up. Apparently having decided that Glover wouldn’t collapse in the next second, Snape had switched from staring at him to staring at Harry. One eyebrow crept further up his face as Harry stood there instead of speaking.  
  
“Have  _you_ Splinched your brain on the way?”  
  
“Things might be easier if I had,” Harry muttered, standing up. “Anyway. Sorry to waste your time, Snape. It was the usual question.” He smiled at Snape. “But I don’t plan to let anyone waste  _either_ of our time again.”  
  
He stepped out of the cottage and left before Snape’s baffled look could turn into a demand for explanations. And as he went, he smiled to himself.  
  
This had been a long time coming, so it wasn’t like visiting Snape had been the only factor in his decision. But Merlin, it felt  _good_ to know that Snape was part of the final catalyst for making that decision.  
  
*  
  
 _I set my life going thanks to him, once._ Harry squeezed hard at Severus’s shoulder.  _I can do it again. He’ll advise me, and he would never ask me to put my patients in danger, not because they’re them, but because I’m me._  
  
“All right,” Harry said. “I think—I think I can work with Malfoy. I think I have to. Can you call him in?”  
  
Severus raised one eyebrow. Harry knew what that meant. To show real commitment to working with Malfoy, Harry should be the one to do it.  
  
With a sigh, Harry stood and walked back to the guest bedroom. Malfoy was in the middle of a long stretch against the wall. He looked at Harry without an expression. Harry wondered for a moment if it was the way he would have looked if Harry had stayed in the Aurors.  
  
“Yeah,” Harry said a moment later. He swallowed. “The murderer seems to be after me, specifically. He left a really creepy message embedded in the names of his victims. I’ll help you.”  
  
There continued to be no expression on Malfoy’s face for extensive moments, long enough that Harry really did think he was going to be a prat and turn away for no discernible reason. Then he lowered his leg from its position against the wall and nodded.  
  
“Good,” he said softly.  
  
Harry nodded back and went away, with the sensation that he’d been carrying a large block of ice that he could finally dump in hot water to melt.  
  
 _That’s one thing settled, anyway._


	3. Part Three

“This is the place the last body was found.”  
  
Draco’s voice was calm, professional, neutral. Severus found himself admiring that as they stood in this desolate little garden and let Harry look around. Severus leaned one shoulder against the stone wall and turned his head slowly from side to side.  
  
Wild, tangled grass grew over a pattern of stones that might once have been paths set into the earth. Severus sniffed, and recognized the distinct lightning-like tint of Auror enchantments that kept the garden both fenced off from Muggles and entirely out of their minds. No Muggle had been here since the body was found, then.  
  
“Did you search the flat?” Harry’s eyes went to the buildings that loomed over the patch of grass, and then dipped back down again.  
  
“Of course,” said Draco. “If you mean the victim’s flat.” He grimaced and shook his head, but even that expression faded a moment later, as if a tossed stone had sunk down into a pond while barely disturbing the placid surface. “Searching the whole building was impossible. Not enough places that we could cast magic undisturbed, too many Muggles in and out and destroying important evidence.”  
  
Harry nodded and crouched down in the middle of the garden, near the flattest patch, where Draco said they’d found the Muggle’s body. Then he drew his wand and began to trace it in a slow, flowing pattern. The lines that he made in the air turned a softly glowing silver. Severus blinked. He hadn’t thought Harry would use that spell.  
  
“What’s he  _doing_?”  
  
Draco sounded indignant enough that Severus bit back his chuckle. Draco would think they were mocking him in particular. “A spell that he developed after he started getting some patients who turned out to be victims of Muggle-baiters. It reveals old magic that had its effect and faded, but he can find out enough to tell what it was.”  
  
Draco’s mouth twitched once. “So a version of the  _Priori Incantatem_  charm that doesn’t work on wands?”  
  
Severus nodded. Draco turned away abruptly and stared at a mass of tangled weeds and thistles. Severus mentally shook his head.   
  
 _If Harry had stayed in the Aurors, you would have felt yourself bound to compete with him, Draco, and that wouldn’t have been good for either of you._  
  
But he would say nothing, not now. He watched Harry, instead, and the silver that brightened and turned into a pattern of knots and ribbons, and remembered the moment that he had made his choice, of that intricate pattern over the wild tumult that Draco’s presence offered.  
  
*  
  
Severus opened the apothecary door and felt his eyebrows rise. “When I had a client contact me requesting privacy,” he said, “I thought it would be someone I  _didn’t_ know.”  
  
“Not funny, Severus.” Draco pressed past him and turned around in the narrow entrance of the shop, his gaze flying from shelf to shelf. Severus had all the ingredients packaged in his own handmade wooden boxes and glass vials, so as to present a neutral front for both Muggles and wizards. “Is he here?”  
  
 _There’s only one person he talks about in that tone,_ Severus thought as he shut the door. He shook his head. “Harry has his own practice and doesn’t set foot in the shop most of the day.”  
  
“Good.” Draco turned around, arms folded. He was trying to project a casual demeanor, but especially after the way he had entered, he couldn’t fool Severus.  
  
 _Of course, he hasn’t been able to fool me for years,_ Severus thought. But although he knew Draco’s real, trembling, restless energy, he didn’t know yet what he’d come for. So he waited, and Draco finally bent his head, pressed his forehead against his folded arms, and whispered, “Don’t make me say it.”  
  
“Considering that I don’t know what you are about to say—”  
  
“You  _would_ , if you had any sense or sensitivity left!” Draco’s head came flying up, and he snarled at Severus. “You know what I feel about you.”  
  
“I know that,” said Severus. “I also knew that you wouldn’t choose me even when Harry stepped back to leave the field clear for you, like the generous fool he is.”  
  
Draco twitched, although Severus didn’t know if it was at the accusation. “So,” Draco whispered. “You think he’s a fool, but you still took him into your bed and your life? How could you do that, if you didn’t care for him? If you cared for  _me_  instead?”  
  
Severus wanted to strike out and wound Draco, but he kept his voice down. “I cared for you both. You, for our bonds during the war and the potential that I saw you growing into once you joined the Aurors in truth. Harry, for his bravery, his generous spirit, his abilities with potions and so much else—”  
  
“So you only admire him because of  _things_ ,” Draco interrupted. “And how can you like his generosity and despise it at the same time?”  
  
“Because I am a human being, and we are not required to justify our every choice and contradiction.”  
  
Draco turned pink enough that Severus thought he could have heated a cauldron on his face. “You—you can’t really mean—”  
  
“I can mean many things,” Severus snapped back. “If I thought you were not a great fool, I would have tried to include you in my life before this. But you refused the invitations I gave you before I got together with Harry. You stepped back and then ran away when Harry tried to clear the path for you. I called him foolish because  _I_ would never have done that for a rival. Harry did, because that is the way Harry is. And then he had the courage to admit what he wanted, which is the kind you lack.”  
  
Draco bowed his head. “You said—you said you care for me.”  
  
“I do,” said Severus, and shook his head. “Another point, Draco, on the scale of being human, something you don’t seem to have understood yet. I can regret what I lost and wonder what would have happened if I made a different choice, without regretting the choice I did make.”  
  
Draco stared at him, baffled. Severus turned and walked towards the back of the apothecary without another word. Let Draco follow him if he wished. If he did not, then Severus would have a quiet cup of tea by himself and shake his head over the boy—for boy he was, even though he had grown.  
  
But Draco did follow him, and Severus warmed up cups of tea for them both and waved his wand to hang a CLOSED sign on the apothecary door. He watched Draco as he sipped the tea warily, and his eyes traveled back and forth between Severus’s wand and the tea.  
  
 _He thinks I’ve enchanted it or slipped a potion into it somehow._ Severus almost snorted aloud. There was no potion that could give someone the permanent courage of their convictions, or he would have slipped it to Draco years ago.  
  
“I don’t understand,” Draco said, and put down his cup. “You wanted me first.”  
  
“That, I cannot be sure of.” Severus shrugged. “My own admitting of my feelings took a long time, and I did not grasp the chance because I was sure that Potter would never come to me—his own delicacy—and you never would, either—you own cowardice.” Draco flushed, but Severus had no desire to hear him speak, yet. “Forgive me for wanting to be  _sought_ for once, Draco.”  
  
“I sought you. You said no.”  
  
“By letter,” Severus said. “And when I answered your first one, you never replied. I do not count that as a spirited enough try.”  
  
Draco closed his eyes. By now, streaks of pink were trailing down his neck, and probably his chest, although his robes prevented Severus from seeing that far.  _A pity,_ Severus thought, and it was. As he had told Draco, that he had chosen his path and was happy as he walked it did not mean he never thought about the other ones he could have taken.  
  
“I thought I would come here and speak one more time,” Draco whispered.  
  
Again, as before, Severus almost didn’t understand him. And then he did, and it was as if the Dark Lord’s cold shadow had swept over him. He put down his teacup. “Draco.”  
  
“I want you to come with me.” Draco snapped his eyes open and stood up, reaching an impetuous hand out. Severus let Draco take his, although he continued to gaze into his eyes. Draco had become good enough at Occlumency to maintain his shields unconsciously, or Severus might have earned more from that. “ _Please,_ Severus. We would have to leave Britain, but that’s all right. I didn’t know—I mean, when I first knew you, I didn’t know it, but Father had property in France. He left it to me when he died. We can go there. I don’t think Potter would follow you. I could find work in the French Ministry. You could set up a shop.  _Please_.”  
  
Severus shook his head. Draco was probably right that the Ministry wouldn’t look for them, at least if Draco resigned properly from the Aurors first. And Harry wouldn’t if he thought it was what Severus really wanted.  
  
But Severus had discovered something in the last few years that he valued more even than being sought. It was having his wishes respected.  
  
“I don’t want to, Draco,” he said, when Draco opened his mouth to talk again, as if he thought the problem was his speech not being persuasive enough. “There was a time when—when I would have come with you without hesitation.” It was difficult to speak those words, not least for the thought of the look in Harry’s eyes if he heard Severus speak them. “But it’s too late now. I did make my choice.”  
  
“Then what was all that  _shit_ about sometimes thinking about the path you didn’t take?” Draco flung his hand away and took a wild turn around the shop. Severus cast silent Cushioning Charms to cradle the vials and boxes Draco was knocking off the shelves. “I thought you were saying you wanted to come with me, but you didn’t want to just say it right out!”  
  
Severus sighed. “I am saying that it is complex, Draco. I am saying that I can love Harry and still think about what could have been with you. I see no point in lying to myself now. I did that for too many years.”  
  
Draco turned around again, and at least this time he noticed when he knocked a vial down, although his tight clutch when he caught it stood the chance of breaking the glass anyway. “And what does  _Potter_ think about these little fantasies of yours?”  
  
Severus smiled. From the way Draco paused, it wasn’t the kind of smile he had thought he would see.  
  
 _But then, he has proven he has little understanding of either Harry or me._  Severus reached out. Draco handed him the vial, moving like an automaton, which included never taking his eyes from Severus’s face.   
  
“Harry knows about them,” Severus said. “He prefers honesty, as well. We’ve discussed them. Harry never seems to tire of hearing why I chose him and not you, in the end.” He set the vial down on the table beside him with a little click.  
  
Draco’s breath caught with a painful sound. “You don’t need to be that way.”  
  
“You came here and asked me to run away with you, and you are still as wild and uncivilized as you were before,” said Severus in a level tone. “I think you needed to hear it so you didn’t try going to Harry next, and  _encouraging_  him to doubt my faithfulness.”  
  
Draco turned the color of porcelain this time. “How does he belong with you?” he whispered. “We’re both Slytherins. He’s a Gryffindor.”  
  
“When you have been out of Hogwarts longer, then you will understand why House distinctions no longer matter to me.”  
  
“You’re telling me that House affiliation doesn’t matter to him at all?” Draco shook his head. “I’m not much older than he is.”  
  
“In years, that is true,” said Severus, and held Draco’s gaze, and waited for him to think of other means of counting time than chronologically.  
  
Draco turned away from him with an angry hiss. “Why did you tell me all that blather about regretting the road not taken if you were just going to put me off?” he whispered. “Why—it’s always the great Harry Potter all over again, isn’t it? When I was a child, he took away the attention and praise I should have had. And now that I’m an adult, he’s  _still_ taking it away.”  
  
“If you think that Harry loved the admiration and praise, you’re as bad as the people who thought he was the Heir of Slytherin,” Severus interrupted, and he didn’t bother tempering his voice this time. Draco was irritating him. “He did not. And another reason I am with him is because he has the wits to see beyond childish competitions.”  
  
“You keep thinking of me as a child. A child can’t want you with as much strength as I do.”  
  
Severus let a moment pass, to absorb the implications of Draco’s words, and then he nodded slowly. “That might be true. But you need to think of other things beyond your own desires, Draco. For example, what do you think Harry’s reaction would be if he saw you right now?”  
  
“He hates me.”  
  
“He might hate certain aspects of your personality,” said Severus. “And yet, he also told me that he was relieved you had survived the war, and that you have more bravery and skill than he had ever thought you would. I suppose you don’t know what he’s talking about?” Severus added. He had wondered himself when Harry brought that up, but Harry had refused to tell him, and Severus supposed he could be hiding an important secret.  
  
 _If Draco tells me of his own free will, though…_  
  
Draco’s face was incredibly pale, though, and Severus sensed he wouldn’t be getting at whatever the truth was today. Draco held up a hand with his palm towards Severus, in fact, when Severus would have advanced on him, and whispered, “Doesn’t he  _know_?”  
  
“Know what?” Severus asked.  
  
“Nothing.” Draco slid his gaze away from Severus for a second, stared blankly at the vial he had knocked off its shelf, and then whipped back around. “I’m making the offer for you to run away with me one more time. Are you coming?”  
  
“I already told you why that’s impossible, Draco,” Severus said, and he spoke as gently as he could. He wished to honor Draco’s dignity even if he couldn’t honor his wishes.  
  
“Then don’t expect me to ask again.”  
  
“If you had asked a different sort of question five years ago, then I would have responded differently,” Severus said. “Even if you had asked a different sort of question now.”  
  
“Like  _what_?” Draco tilted his head back and gave a maniacal chuckle that reminded Severus far too much of Bellatrix. He frowned at Draco. He saw no reason for insane laughter to descend into the middle of the proceedings.  
  
“If you had asked if you could come along and talk with Harry and perhaps see if the two of you could exchange mutual apologies,” Severus responded. “I would have invited you to dinner.”  
  
Draco stared at him as if he  _was_ the one who had introduced the mad chuckle, then shook his head. “He hates me.”  
  
“You keep saying that, and I don’t think you have the least idea what the word means,” Severus said. “At least to Harry.  _Will_ you come to dinner?”  
  
“I came to ask one question, and it was answered. Now I’m going. I don’t have time for this.” Draco turned and left, pushing the door open hard enough that the CLOSED sign fell off it. Severus rescued it before it hit the floor and hung it back up again, sighing.  
  
Severus stood looking after him for a second. Honesty compelled him to admit that he wished, sometimes, he had made a go of things with Draco.  
  
And honesty also compelled him to admit that it would have been disastrous. Severus would have been the one doing all the coaxing and prodding, long past the point where they should have begun to share the responsibility for each other as adults.  
  
Severus shook his head and turned to resume his brewing once more. Brewing was the only cure for a mind this tumbled and tumultuous.  
  
Brewing, or Harry’s embrace. And Harry wouldn’t be off work for some hours yet.  
  
*  
  
“There.”  
  
Harry rose and backed away from the silver pattern that glowed on the ground in front of him. As Severus watched, it spread to outline the plants in the overgrown garden, and climbed the stone walls, and flickered here and there on the stones that made the paths.  
  
“What is that?” Draco had his nose stuck in the air again, and Severus wished he could tell him that no one here had a desperate desire to know how often he cleaned it. They would take his word for it. “How does it tell you what spell might have been cast here?”  
  
“The pattern of the knots,” Harry said, gesturing with his wand towards the edges of the spell, which had intricate little windings of light on them. Severus had never bothered to learn to read them, but they reminded him of Celtic knots. “They’re like runes. They tell me what class of magic the spell belongs to, like Divination or Transfiguration. Then I read them down and work out the spell.”  
  
“Divination is a  _class_?” Draco demanded, but fell silent when Severus put a restraining hand on his arm. Severus decided to remind himself of this power in the future. He would probably be able to use it for good.  
  
Harry walked down the side of one path, and then stooped with a soft exclamation. Severus saw the way his eyes flickered back and forth between the nearest bush, the clump of thistle where the body had been found, and then his face darkened and he nodded.  
  
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he whispered.  
  
“If you don’t tell me what it means right now, Harry Potter,” Draco began, which made Severus turn his head a little to stare at him. That sounded like something  _he_ would have said, rather than Draco.  
  
Harry just gave a little shrug and said, “There were a bunch of spells cast here that day. They overlap one another, which makes the reading more difficult. But they were all spells of the Blood Arts class.” He sighed and spent a moment massaging his forehead. Severus found bitter amusement in the way that Draco promptly tried to stare through Harry’s hand to the scar beneath. “And I should have thought of that before, with the silver bands and the intestines hanging out and so on.”  
  
“I’ve never heard of Blood Arts.”  
  
Harry turned around with his mouth open, probably to make some remark about Auror training. Severus caught Harry’s eye and shook his head.   
  
Perhaps his silent reminder to Harry that Harry had taught himself a lot about magic in the past seven years, even apart from his status as a Healer, got through. Harry replied more temperately. “They’re spells that channel magic through blood. I know more about them than most because Healers are educated in reversing them.”  
  
“And this was used—what? As a taunt for you?”  
  
Severus blinked. That was a more sophisticated understanding than he had expected from Draco when he had seemingly come into this so resistant to Harry’s help.  
  
“I don’t think that only, although that may be part of the whole of the case.” Harry tilted his head back, musing in a way Severus had learned to trust. It usually meant he was on the verge of some incredible breakthrough. “Wait a minute. There’s something I want to check.”  
  
He reached out and cast another spell, one that made the flickering silver outlines glow warm and gold. Severus shivered from the force behind the spell. It was one he didn’t recognize, but that only made it more interesting.  
  
Harry tilted his head. He took a step forwards.  
  
“ _Potter_!” Draco cried out suddenly.  
  
Harry whipped his head around to look at Draco in surprise, but it was too late to know what he would have done with the warning. His foot came down in the middle of one outline of golden light.  
  
And there was a silent fountain of sparks in return, red instead of gold, reminding Severus of a horrendous moment of the sparks that had gone up from the maze during the Third Task of the Triwizard Tournament, the moment that had marked the Dark Lord’s true return and ended his freedom for three years.  
  
When the fountain died down, Harry was gone.  
  
*  
  
Draco  _wanted_ to run around screaming in panic like a child. But he had been trained out of desires like that when he went through the Aurors’ harsh instruction.  
  
Harsher for someone like him, who had been a Death Eater, than people who hadn’t. On the other hand, that meant he could think about what had happened now, instead of succumbing to his emotions and whimpering.  
  
He had seen golden light like that before. He had only to incant the proper counter for it, and things ought to work out.  
  
Ignoring the way Severus had turned to him and was trying to ask a question, Draco held out his wand. He made sure he was within reach of the golden light around the stones on the ground, but not near enough to let it touch him. That was all he’d need, both Potter and the only one who could free him trapped in the same place.  
  
“ _Ianuam aperio_ ,” he said, and his voice didn’t shake, and neither did his wand hand, and the light in front of him groaned aloud as the spell forced it away from the earth and into the air. Draco watched as it outlined the shape of an open door, and then golden pinwheels and spirals opened up beyond that, into a space Draco wouldn’t cross if his life depended on it.  
  
 _If Potter’s life does?_  
  
Draco pushed the notion away. He was sure that he could bring Potter back without going through the door. That was what counted. He leaned back and watched as the magic continued, reaching further and further.  
  
Draco knew he was panting, knew that sweat had slickened his palms and the back of his neck and even the skin between his fingers. To operate, the spell had to draw on him for its power. But he didn’t back down. At least he didn’t have to run and jump while the magic was doing this, although he might have to if it drew Potter back through the door with something else attached.  
  
“Your spell forces the trap to release him?”  
  
Draco grimaced. It did seem unfair that he had to  _speak_ while he was concentrating so hard. But as long as Severus asked only yes-or-no questions, he might manage it. He sawed his head back and forth, while staring at the spirals.  
  
Had they formed into a semblance of another shape there, one that might reach the place Potter had gone and crack it open? Draco hoped so.  
  
“What spell did he use? I didn’t recognize it.”  
  
Draco sighed and resigned himself to parting his lips and speaking a little. “One that should reveal traps. However, it triggered the trap when it released. I think Potter’s right that the Blood Arts spells here were attuned to him. To taunt him, but also to take him.”  
  
Yes, the shape of light beyond the door had turned into a wedge. Draco leaned forwards, tense. The simplest traps had the shape of lids or trapdoors that could be lifted by wedges. He only hoped that his spell had sensed the existence of one and responded accordingly instead of simply forming one common key that would be defeated by a more unusual trap.  
  
“What—”  
  
Draco flung up a hand. Severus was smart enough to fall silent. Draco couldn’t evade the thought that if Potter was here, then he wouldn’t do the same thing.  
  
 _Of course, Potter was stupid enough to fall victim to the damn trap in the first place. Not exactly a rousing recommendation._  
  
The wedge was definitely solid now, and Draco could see blue flickers along the edges of the light that made it up. He breathed softly. Blue light was also a good sign, a sign that his spell was breaking through whatever layers of illusions and distractions the trap-maker had set up.  
  
Then the wedge abruptly snapped back towards him. Draco staggered as the magic poured out of him in response to the spell’s need, an abrupt pull that made him have to brace his feet.  
  
Severus grabbed him around the waist and held him like that. Draco leaned his face along Severus’s neck and closed his eyes. The warmth served to ground him and let him whisper one more spell that could help his earlier one along. “ _Do cumulate_.”  
  
The wind around him seemed to howl, and Draco started forwards against Severus’s embrace. Without it there, he would have either fallen or gone through the door. He had tapped all his magic at once, even the strength that kept his muscles working and his heart beating.   
  
“You  _idiot_ ,” Severus breathed into his ear.  
  
Draco ignored him, keeping his gaze fixed through the open doorway on the wedge he’d made, now shaped more like a pair of claws flying back towards him. A pair of claws that had something clasped in it.  
  
When the claws finally retracted through the door, Potter was in them. He fell on the ground with his face turned up towards the sky and his body flopping, limp. There was blood across his chest where something had torn his shirt to tatters. Whatever had made those marks had claws itself, Draco thought. Like the ones that marked a Dementor’s hand.  
  
Severus set him down gently, then knelt beside Harry, reaching into one robe pocket for something that could be anything from a healing potion to a healing herb. Draco watched him, and remembered.   
  
Potter never knew it, but Draco saw him just as vulnerable one time after Potter had used the  _Sectumsempra_ Curse on him, and he could have hurt him.  
  
Just as vulnerable. Just one time.  
  
*  
  
Draco had gone down to the Quidditch pitch to stare at the grass. The stars hung above him, and the doom the Dark Lord had foretold loomed over him. He had come up with a way to let the Death Eaters into Hogwarts, but not to harm Dumbledore. The scars on his chest ached.  
  
His parents were going to die.  
  
Draco grabbed his ears and bowed his head between his knees. But his own noisy breathing and his suspicion that he was about to faint disgusted him, so he ended up pulling back and up. He looked around in despair, wishing that he could find a way to fly, a school broom left out that no one would miss. If he could only circle the pitch a few times, then he thought he could calm down and remember his duty.  
  
There was something pale glimmering off near the stands where Ravenclaws usually sat during the Quidditch games. In desperation, hoping maybe it was the moonlight reflecting off a really polished broom, Draco went towards it.  
  
It turned out to be Potter.  
  
Draco stopped and stared at him. The paleness he’d seen came from Potter’s face and hands. He looked like a ghost, curled up on the grass, his hands bent underneath his chin. His hair sprawled across his cheek, so dark that Draco couldn’t see it until he was close. It had broken up the recognizable outline of Potter’s face from just a few meters away.  
  
Why was he here? Draco knew the Gryffindor Quidditch team had practiced earlier that day, but that didn’t mean that Potter should have fallen asleep. He should have walked back into Hogwarts with his mates and laughed and chatted and shoved food into his unscarred stomach.  
  
Draco’s scars seemed to burn then. He held up his wand.  
  
He could do it, he thought. He could curse Potter. He could even kill him. No one would ever know, not if Draco was careful to take the steps that would protect his wand against the  _Priori Incantatem_ charm. He could get away with it, and he would have his revenge, and the Dark Lord—  
  
The Dark Lord would probably eviscerate him, Draco realized suddenly. He probably wanted to kill Potter himself.  
  
But Draco didn’t know that for certain. The only thing he knew  _for certain_ was that the Dark Lord hadn’t commanded him to kill Harry Potter.  
  
 _No, only do other impossible things,_ Draco thought bitterly.  
  
As he stood there, clutching his wand, thinking, Potter muttered a little and turned over. Now his hand was a breath away from Draco’s boot. Draco looked down at it, checked to make sure that Potter’s eyes were still closed, and thought about stepping on Potter’s hand, crunching down and twisting, breaking his fingers.  
  
His third thought was,  _I’d get caught._  
  
His second thought was,  _I’d wake him up._  
  
The first one was,  _I don’t want to do that._  
  
Draco stood there, and fought a bitter battle in his heart and soul—one he could only fight because he wouldn’t have to admit it to anyone. He didn’t think even the Dark Lord or Snape would read it out of his mind, because he was going to die before then for failing to kill Dumbledore.  
  
He smiled when it was done, not a happy smile. He already knew that.   
  
He didn’t want to hurt Potter  _not_ because the Dark Lord might kill him in return for not keeping Potter inviolate for his own wand. He didn’t want to hurt Potter because he didn’t want to hurt him.  
  
Not even in revenge for the scars. It wouldn’t make Draco feel better to break Potter’s hand, or his nose, the way he had at the start of the year, or cover his chest with scars that twinged and ached like Draco’s own. It wouldn’t change anything. Potter was irrelevant to Draco’s life now.  
  
At least, he was irrelevant as revenge. He mattered too much in ways that Draco didn’t want to examine, and always would.  
  
In the end, Draco turned and walked away from the Quidditch pitch and left Harry Potter sleeping under the stars. He was entering the Slytherin common room before he realized that he no longer felt as if he would have liked to fly. Both the aching in his chest and the constant restlessness in his heart had stopped.  
  
*  
  
Draco shook his head and watched as Potter sat up with Severus’s arm behind him. Potter didn’t look particularly grateful for that blessing. He was coughing and choking, and as Draco watched, he turned to the side and retched out a stream of water. But he was all right enough a moment later to take a drink from a flask that Severus offered him.  
  
Severus didn’t fuss over Potter as Draco would have expected. Instead, he sat back and studied him with critical eyes for a second, then nodded. “What happened beyond that door?” he demanded. “And why were you so foolish as to step into it?”  
  
Draco blinked. He had thought Severus would evince concern for his lover. Imagining that was one of the things that had made the thought of being Severus’s lover attractive to Draco in the first place.  
  
But Potter didn’t seem upset at the lack of tenderness. He only said, “I thought the spell was going to show me something about the magical signature of the killer. Instead…” He trailed off, frowning. Then he said, “It seemed to be more than one magical signature.” He glanced up at Draco. “Could there be more than one person working together?”  
  
“Maybe,” Draco said. “We haven’t encountered any evidence that there is more than one person, though.”  
  
 _And we also haven’t found any evidence that there isn’t._  
  
From Potter’s sharp look, he heard Draco’s unspoken addition, but he only inclined his head and murmured, “Well, that’s what it felt like. Multiple magical signatures overlayered and overlapping. There must have been a lot of people here.”  
  
“A ritual, then,” Draco suggested, feeling his hands grow cold. “Maybe the silver bands are a relic of a ritual the killers performed.”  
  
Potter seemed about to answer, but Severus broke in impatiently. “Why are your lungs full of water?”  
  
“They’re not, now,” Potter muttered in what seemed to be a deliberately provocative way, and ignored the way Severus poked at him. “But anyway. I flew through a door that clawed me on the way down, and I got dropped straight into a tank full of water that began slowly rising.” He nodded to Draco. “Thank you for saving my life, Malfoy. I can cast a few Bubble-Head Charms and the like, but I would have died eventually.”  
  
Draco blinked slowly, but he managed to incline his head, because he knew he would look like an idiot if he didn’t. Potter turned back to speak to Severus. Draco had no need to listen to him, because he knew more about those kinds of traps than Potter did, probably. It was how he had known to cast the spell that would fetch Potter back.  
  
He would have expected Potter to either speak in high resentment when he told Draco about the life-debt, or immediately clarify that he didn’t actually owe Draco one, because all Draco had done was pay back one of the two he owed  _Potter_. But he hadn’t done that. He had spoken with what sounded like respect and coolness.  
  
He had treated Draco like a person and not an unwanted guest for the first time.  
  
Draco swallowed hard. He felt as though he was flooded with the same, hard kind of quietening that he had discovered on the Quidditch pitch all those years ago, when he stood watching Potter. All his expectations had been overset, and Potter had discovered several things that could make the case easier, and he had been—thanked.  
  
“Malfoy?”  
  
It was Potter, but he sounded calm, not impatient. Draco snapped back to the scene in front of him, and nodded. It was absurd, he thought, to let mere  _words_ make such a difference. He shouldn’t let them, in fact. He should let matters take their course, and use Potter and Severus’s help to solve the case, and then leave the Muggle world with the Argent killer or killers firmly in his possession.  
  
But he knew he would leave with more reluctance than he had expected to feel. Because of a few calm words and the skill Potter had displayed. Maybe even because of a night sixteen years ago and the way that Potter had refused his hand twenty-one years ago.  
  
Privately, Draco could admit he would still have liked Potter’s friendship if it had been on offer.  
  
But only privately. And it never had been. Draco knew that.  
  
The one thing he prided himself on most over the last several years, besides his skill as an Auror and the way he had earned respect from his peers, was the chipping away of the foolishness that had made him a sixteen-year-old menace to be around. No one would take him in again.  
  
 _That includes me, with my own delusions._


	4. Part Four

“This is far more serious than I thought at first.”  
  
Harry, leaning back at the table with his hands clasped around the mug of hot chocolate, rolled his eyes a little. “And it  _wasn’t_ serious when someone was running all around the country killing wizards and Muggles? Or a band of people?” There were so many overlapping signatures in the magic he’d felt in the garden that he thought it had to be at least five.  
  
There was also something disturbing about one of those signatures, something he would wait to tell Severus until he was sure Malfoy had gone to bed.  
  
“I mean that they did not target someone I knew until now.”  
  
Harry couldn’t help it. He snorted a little with laughter, and Severus’s face froze. Harry reached out and took his hand. “I didn’t mean it that way. I only meant that it was such a  _Slytherin_ thing to say.”  
  
It took Severus a moment to relax, but he squeezed Harry’s hand back at last. “You are dealing better with the other Slytherin in the house at the moment than I expected.”  
  
“He saved my life,” Harry said simply. “And I was watching you together, and I knew what you meant about paths not taken.”  
  
Severus started in a way that made Harry glad  _he_ didn’t have any drink in his hand. Then he leaned back in his chair and tried to smooth his expression out. “What are you talking about?”  
  
Harry wouldn’t have spoken about this ordinarily, but he had almost died today, and he was still disturbed by what he had found in the garden. “I mean that when you look at him, your eyes are warm. In a different way than they are when you look at me.”  
  
Severus turned his head a little to the side, and murmured, “Must we address this now?”  
  
“Yeah.” Harry clenched his hand down on Severus’s once, then moved it back. “I was going to say—if you want to…do something, then I wouldn’t mind.”  
  
Severus’s face flickered through so many expressions so fast that Harry wished he was better at Legilimency. Then he leaned nearer and hissed, “What sort of being do you take me for?”  
  
“Someone who’s decided to be honest,” Harry said. “And someone who does want Malfoy. I  _know_ that look, Severus,” he added, when Severus opened his mouth to defend himself in a particular way. “I don’t think wanting is a bad thing. But if you want to go ahead and sleep with him, that’s different from wanting. I’m telling you that I would understand.”  
  
Severus looked as though  _he_ was about to turn murderer in a second, maybe without the silver bands. He cleared his throat roughly and said, “And what part of ‘I do not regret my choice’ did you not understand?”  
  
“Nothing,” Harry said. “I—look, it isn’t that I think Malfoy would really want or welcome a relationship with you if I was part of the picture. But I also know you. And the heart wants what the heart wants.”  
  
Severus abruptly seized his shoulders and yanked Harry towards him. Harry hissed as his hot chocolate spilled and soaked his hand, scalding it. Severus appeared to be paying no attention to that as he lowered his head and whispered hotly in Harry’s ear.  
  
“This is because you nearly died today, isn’t it? You’re already trying to find me someone who would console me and help me  _move on_.” Severus bit Harry’s neck savagely, and Harry forgot all about the pain in his hand. “Fool. I may want you both, but I don’t want you the same way I do Draco. And you are not dead.”  
  
Harry opened his mouth to respond, but it was a little hard to do that when Severus’s savage tongue was filling it, and he tilted his head back further back and further back, and succumbed to the kiss that Severus was determined to impose on him. Severus pressed as if he wanted to push the chair into Harry’s back and make a pattern of it on his skin. Harry couldn’t say he would mind that right now.  
  
A bump from further down the corridor reminded Severus, it seemed, of Malfoy’s presence in the house at the same time as it reminded Harry. Severus pulled back and gave Harry a panting, sideways-squinted expression. “You can count on this resuming when we get into bed.” He squeezed Harry’s fingers in a way that said he wanted to leave the impression of his own knuckles in Harry’s skin now. “And you are  _going_  to tell me what else you’re holding back, the instant that Mr. Malfoy goes to bed. Unless you would prefer me to read it out of your mind.”  
  
Harry squeezed his hand back and said nothing for long moments, his mind roaming through the first time he and Severus had gone to bed.  
  
*  
  
“I haven’t done this before.”  
  
Severus’s voice was harsh, rasping. For a second, Harry’s heart bounded up, as he thought he had companionship in his secret misery.  
  
Then Severus added, face just visible as he walked through a bar of moonlight that entered via the window, “I do not know how it is with two men,” and Harry had to pick up the burden of his misery again.  
  
“I’ve had enough books shoved down my throat by Hermione that I think I can make a fairly good guess,” Harry said calmly, and started to take off his robe. He almost missed the horrified expression on Severus’s face as he turned around, but he did pause before he dragged his robe over his head. “What?”  
  
“You told  _Granger_ about this?”  
  
“No one had to tell Hermione anything,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “She just finds out. She knew I was interested in you before I officially made a move. She gave me books about gay sex. She knew I was probably going to take up a Healing career before I did, and she got me books on that.”  
  
“Does she ever get you books on the wrong thing?”  
  
“Um. Yeah.” Harry felt his ears burn. Hermione had got him books on being a young parent when she had decided, for some reason, that Ginny was pregnant and she and Harry would need to raise the baby together. Explaining why that  _couldn’t_ be true was one of the more humiliating conversations of Harry’s life.  
  
Severus, though, seemed satisfied enough with that not to press for details. He nodded. “Then I shall defer to your superior expertise.” He lay back on the bed as though he thought Harry would take care of everything from here.  
  
Harry choked. Then he dragged his robe off, so that he could stop his hands from shaking. Then he approached Severus and began undressing  _him_. At least he thought that was something he knew about and couldn’t mess up too badly.  
  
From the way that Severus’s eyes cut into him, he didn’t agree. But Harry still managed to get him half-naked before Severus spoke.  
  
“Tell me the cause of your nervousness, or I will read it from your mind.”  
  
Harry winced and said, “Look. You said that you didn’t know how it went between two men, and I told you I only knew about it from books.” Maybe if he inflected his voice just right, Severus would know what he was talking about and spare him the humiliation of saying the words.  
  
Severus only said, “Yes? Does that mean that I should also read some of these books before we start, so you will not hurt or shock me?”  
  
“I didn’t—” Harry cleared his throat. Damn, this  _was_ going to be worse than the conversation with Hermione. “That’s the only way I know about how it goes at all. I mean. I’ve never had a lover. A man  _or_ a woman.” He kept his head turned away, staring at the foot of the bed. “So you probably still know more about this than I do.”  
  
There was silence, silence so thick that Harry thought he would choke on it. But he would have to breathe sooner or later, so he turned around and looked at Severus.  
  
Severus had sat up again and was looking at him thoughtfully. Harry put his head up and strove for an air of nonchalance. He hoped this wasn’t a sign that Severus was reconsidering sex with him.  
  
“I should have known better than to trust in those rumors which portrayed you as the most wildly skilled lover ever to walk Diagon Alley,” Severus murmured, turning his head a little to the side.  
  
Harry grinned. It was hard to do; it felt like his lips were made of wax. But he did want to tell Severus that this wasn’t a problem for  _him_. He didn’t know if it would be for Severus or not. “Yeah. No rumors were true.”  
  
Severus considered him endlessly. Harry thought about offering to Summon the books Hermione had given him again, but he knew Severus needed to have some time to think about this. So he stood still, and Severus finally nodded.  
  
“Then we will begin a different way,” he said, and stood up from the bed. Harry’s breathing was erratic as he watched Severus walk over to stand in front of him.  
  
Casually, Severus put his hands on Harry’s shoulders. Harry fought the urge to ask him what he was doing or push them off. Instead, he reached up and mimicked the gesture. Severus nodded as if at a promising Potions apprentice.  
  
Then he leaned down, watching Harry narrowly all the while, and began to kiss him.  
  
This part, at least, Harry had had some experience in. He thrust his tongue wildly around for a bit, until Severus’s hands tightened and he firmly twined his tongue around Harry’s, pressing it carefully down behind his teeth. Harry listened, yielded, and went with the motions that Severus showed him—motions, Severus told him later, that were less likely to choke a partner.  
  
Harry was glad that he didn’t know that at the time. He would have concentrated more on the burning in his cheeks than the burning in his mouth or his groin, which had become persistent enough that he shifted against Severus, wanting to do something about them.  
  
Severus reached down without stopping the kiss, and easily lifted Harry’s leg around his waist. Harry gasped.  _There_. That brought them close enough together that he could feel each exhale in his ear. And it pressed them together firmly enough that—  
  
Harry’s eyes rolled back. Severus shook him a little, and Harry had to smile. Severus had been most insistent, when he’d decided to sleep with Harry, that this was going to be mutual and not either of them just “servicing” the other.  
  
“Yeah, all right,” Harry gasped, or whisper-gasped, or whatever, and leaned up and pressed himself as firmly as he could against Severus.  
  
There was so much heat there, it could easily be shared. Severus’s hand was behind Harry’s neck, gripping tightly enough to let Harry feel each individual finger, each individual nail. Harry leaned in harder and harder, and made Severus sway on his feet. And then they slid-collapsed to the floor beside the bed, and Harry decided that this wasn’t so difficult after all, and finished stripping Severus.  
  
Severus considered him with eyebrows raised. Harry could feel the heat rushing up to his face, but he would never do  _anything_ if he just kept being paralyzed by embarrassment every time, so he fixed a smile on his face and leaned in to put their chests together.  
  
That distracted Severus well enough, it seemed. His eyes were narrow as if to keep his own pleasure under control when he tugged at the remaining clothes Harry wore, and they got them off between them. Then Harry reached up and slung Severus to the side, rolling over himself so he was beneath Severus.  
  
“Tell me what you’re doing.” Even breathless, Severus was arrogant.  
  
“This thing,” Harry said. If it had a name, he’d forgotten it. There was a burning in his brain and in his hands and in his skin where their chests touched. He reached out and hooked one hand around Severus’s neck again; Severus had pulled back when they started doing something he didn’t recognize, although technically Harry thought _everything_ they did was something Severus didn’t recognize. “Roll with me.”  
  
And he lifted his hips and pressed them furiously against Severus, and Severus pressed his down, grunting once in understanding.  
  
They made it to the bed later that night, and having someone inside him was an event that made Harry wish both that it had happened earlier and that it could happen again, like this, between them. But that first time was on the floor, erection against erection, and Severus’s fingernails curling dangerously near Harry’s eyesockets with furious arousal as he came.  
  
That was the time Harry thought he would remember best, as Severus lay on top of him and panted cooling breaths into his ear. If he ever thought about doubting what they had. That was the memory that would come back to him.  
  
*  
  
Harry was listening, and he finally heard the firm way Malfoy’s door shut. A second later, the hissing tingle of privacy charms came up. Harry nodded and turned to face Severus.  
  
“I told you there were so many magical signatures in the garden that it was hard to recognize any of them separately,” he said.  
  
“You did.” Severus put his hands on the table as if he was bracing himself to flip it, or use it as a shield.  
  
“One of them was Malfoy’s.”  
  
Severus sat there in perfect, blank-eyed astonishment for a long moment. Then he shook his head and said in a voice Harry didn’t have the words to define, “And because of this, you  _wanted_ me to sleep with Mr. Malfoy?”  
  
“No.” Harry swallowed and shook his head. “I don’t  _want_ it. Merlin, Severus. I like what we have. It isn’t even that I almost died today. I know you, though. I know you haven’t forgotten what it’s like to want Malfoy, because of the way you looked at him today.” He glanced away and dug his fingers into the table himself. “I thought—if you slept with him once, and figured out what it was you were missing, then maybe the desire would go away, and Malfoy would go away, and things would go back to normal.”  
  
It sounded unworthy. But Severus had promised him complete honesty. He had replied honestly when Harry had asked him, early on in their dating, if he looked at Malfoy with desire. Now Harry owed him this.  
  
“I do not have to have everything I want.”  
  
Harry blinked and turned back to face Severus. “That’s not what you said the last time we discussed this.”  
  
“I would  _like_ to have everything I want,” Severus said dryly. “I would like to be thirty different men living thirty different lives so that I could explore all the possibilities of Potions and lovers and countries to live in. I would like you to never have been an orphan. I would like the war never to have happened.” He paused and drew a breath, then reached out and pulled one finger slowly down the back of Harry’s hand. Harry shuddered a little as the flesh of his hand rippled in tingling awareness.  
  
“That does not mean I am willing to give everything else up so that I might have one thing,” Severus whispered. “It does not mean that I am willing to give up our lives together.”  
  
Harry closed his eyes as a weight he hadn’t known was there tipped and wobbled off his shoulders, then crashed to pieces on the floor at their feet. “Thanks,” he whispered.  
  
“Now,” Severus said, when enough time had passed that Harry’s breathing had almost calmed down to normal again, “when were you going to tell Draco about finding his signature among the others’?”  
  
“I wasn’t going to tell him,” Harry snapped, turning back to face Severus.  _Is he mental?_ It was either that, or he was attempting to protect Malfoy again, for Merlin knew what reason. “He could be one of the people who’s trying to kill me. Why would I give him any advantage?”  
  
Severus settled back in his chair. “Yet you let him stay in this house, and encouraged me to sleep with him. Somehow, I don’t think you’re very concerned about the threat that Draco poses.”  
  
Harry felt his face heat up.  _That_ much was certainly true, and perhaps he hadn’t thought through all the implications. But he did manage to shrug and say, “I wouldn’t learn anything from telling him what I found. Of course he’d deny it, and of course we wouldn’t gain any benefit from it. He’d probably be insulted that I asked in the first place.”  
  
“I wonder why.”  
  
Harry’s face went even hotter at the sarcasm. “But if we keep him close, then I can wait for him to make a move and confront him when he does,” he finished. “It benefits me to have him stay in the house, whether or not he ever realizes that I’m on to him.”  
  
“There may be other, magical explanations for his signature being in the garden,” Severus said. “Or mundane ones, such as his being the initial investigating Auror who arrived on the scene. And you forget that I am a Legilimens and Draco trusts me enough to submit his mind to me. Of course we should ask.”  
  
Harry glanced away and dashed a hand through his hair. “Sorry. You’re right. But I’d prefer that you do it alone. That way, I don’t have to witness his humiliation under Legilimency, and he’s more likely to tell you everything you want to know.”  
  
“I doubt that last part would make any difference to him. He would know I would repeat the conclusions to you immediately.” Harry stayed silent, and Severus squeezed his wrist. “Harry, what  _is_ this about?”  
  
Harry closed his eyes and tried to heave out all the poison in his chest on a breath. It didn’t work, even after Severus’s assurance that he didn’t want to leave Harry’s bed and enter Malfoy’s.  
  
So he would have to tell the truth.  
  
“I don’t want him here because I’m bloody jealous, all right?” Harry whispered harshly. “I wish that he’d been able to go to anyone else with the case. Or I wish he’d figured out the code in the names and I was only someone who needed protection, not involved. Or I wish he’d decided to stay in the Leaky Cauldron!” His voice rose. He clipped it off. “Anywhere but here.”  
  
“Jealous? What of, when he did not win what you won, and achieved something that you said you did not want to achieve?”  
  
 _He has the right to ask those questions,_ Harry told himself, while a burning sensation filled his chest as though someone had put a piece of flaming ice there.  _It probably sounds mental to him, that I would be jealous of Malfoy._  
  
But he had promised honesty, and that was what he used. “You and him are still close in ways I can’t match. I would never be that comfortable letting you use Legilimency to read my mind, while you said he would. He’s a good Auror, and sometimes I feel like I failed at that or walked away just because I couldn’t measure up to what they wanted me to do. He stayed in the wizarding world and worked for the respect he’s gained. I live partially in the Muggle world and don’t interact much with wizards. He—has some things I would like to have.”  
  
“Despite being a Healer and not wanting to be an Auror?”  
  
Harry nodded slowly and forced his eyes open. “I know it doesn’t make much sense.”  
  
“It may not,” Severus agreed, but he was watching Harry with a calm look instead of the impatient one he adopted when Harry did something that he  _really_ couldn’t understand. “On the other hand, I appreciate that you are willing to say these things. And as for the closeness between me and Draco, now, you cannot match it.”   
  
Harry swallowed pain.  
  
“But do you have to match it?” Severus played with Harry’s fingers, moving them up and down in a way Harry had to admit was soothing. “Just as I want you in different ways, we relate in different ways. You need not torment yourself over that.”  
  
“It isn’t so much  _tormenting_ myself as…not wanting him here,” Harry muttered. He felt drained now, and the flaming cube of ice had been put out. “Like I said, I know that it doesn’t make much sense. But that’s the way it is.”  
  
“I am not going to run off with Draco Malfoy,” Severus said. “But I do think it would be good if I spoke to him alone about this, as you requested.”  
  
Harry couldn’t help the nakedly grateful look he gave Severus, and he knew it. He nodded and started to stand up from the table. While he’d had the day off today, he had some paperwork he needed to get in order before he went into the office tomorrow.  
  
“And after that,” Severus added, pausing Harry in mid-motion as effectively as if he was a Muggle machine, “you and Draco will have a talk. A real one. A  _deep_ one.”  
  
Harry grimaced at the thought of speaking to Malfoy that way. Only the knowledge that Severus was being honest, too, and wouldn’t have requested this if he didn’t think Harry and Draco needed it, let him say, “Okay. I can do that.”  
  
“I know you can. I will never ask anything of you beyond your strength.”  
  
Harry gave Severus a drained smile and slipped away from the table. He would leave unsaid, at least for now, his thought that Severus sometimes believed Harry’s strength was greater than Harry knew it really was.  
  
*  
  
“What explanation do you have for your magical signature being among the ones Harry detected in the Muggle garden?”  
  
Draco sat frozen before his breakfast, staring. At least he had put the porridge spoon down before it could drip all over, he thought distantly. And Severus had asked the question in a way that didn’t accuse him, that gave him breathing room, even if the tone behind the words had been shrewder and sharper than Draco would have liked.  
  
Now, though…  
  
Draco shoved himself back from the table and said, “I cast spells at the scene.”  
  
“Your signature was entwined with all the others Harry could sense, the ones that cast the murderous spells.” Severus studied him, and waited.  
  
Bile crept up Draco’s throat, and he lashed out before he could think about the consequences of doing so. “And of course you’re going to believe him, and trust him, and not even  _think_ he could be mistaken, just because he’s Harry Bloody Potter? Right? And he couldn’t be here to tell me about this himself, he sent you to do his dirty work—”  
  
“That is enough, Draco.”  
  
Draco caught his breath back roughly. Severus had spoken in a way that made it impossible for him to argue. But he did know that he probably was expected to storm out of the house and take up residence somewhere else for the duration of the case.  
  
Bizarrely, that was what made him calm down again. He ended up sitting down and saying, as sarcastically as he could, “And Potter hasn’t yet called the Aurors?”  
  
“You are an Auror.” Severus hadn’t moved at all, except to slowly tap one finger on the table, so slowly that Draco couldn’t call it a gesture of impatience. “He felt safe enough with you not to reveal the news to me last night until after you’d gone to bed. And he was concerned about humiliating you when I suggested he tell you what he’d sensed.”  
  
Draco slowly leaned back in his chair. The more he thought about it, the more it  _didn’t_ make sense that Potter would have let him stay in the house if he had honestly suspected that Draco was a murderer.  
  
But he managed to say, “I didn’t leave my magical signature there. Not intertwined with the others. I have no part in this. You have to believe me, Severus.”  
  
“I do,” said Severus, and Draco noticed the light emphasis on the first word. “But I do want to use Legilimency on you. Not so much to clear up Harry’s suspicions as to see what clues you might have missed, clues that might have led to Harry reading your signature as part of the hostile mass.”  
  
Draco considered it for a second with his hand locked on the chair behind his head. If Potter honestly suspected him, Draco didn’t understand why he hadn’t gone after him the minute he could get his feet under him and his hand wrapped securely around his wand. Like Severus said, there were other currents moving beneath the surface here.   
  
Of course, he had always known  _that_. But he had thought the currents were on his side alone, the legacy of his mistreatment by Potter and the world in general after the war with the Dark Lord.  
  
He leaned his head back and said, “All right. I’ll let you use Legilimency on me. But in return, I want to see either a memory of Potter’s or use Legilimency on him. I need to see that pattern of signatures to understand it.”  
  
Severus sighed, then inclined his head. “It will have, I think, to be Legilimency. A Pensieve memory will not necessarily show the things that Harry’s magical senses could perceive, especially to someone else whose purely physical senses overlapped and merged with his in that particular memory.”  
  
Draco nodded, satisfied enough. He could put up with a lot, he thought, as long as Potter endured equivalent humiliation. And he didn’t mind the way Severus would read _his_ mind, because he knew Severus would be gentle.  
  
And also that he, himself, was innocent, whatever strange reason his magical signature had for ending up in that garden.  
  
As he leaned back and waited for Severus to reach into him, his thoughts flitted back to the last time he had actually entered Potter’s mind with Legilimency.  
  
*  
  
“I told you already, there’s no grand secret, I just don’t want to do this anymore—Malfoy?”  
  
Draco steadied himself against the unpleasant surprise in Potter’s voice. “Well,” he said, shrugging a little as he stopped inside the door of the small office and made a show of adjusting his cloak and Auror robes around him. “I’m one of the few trainees who happens to be skilled in Legilimency, you know.”  
  
“I thought you were good at Occlumency,” said Potter, sitting up and staring at him from across the length of the bare room. At the moment, Draco didn’t think it was big or bare enough. “And why would they bother sending a trainee when they could send a full-fledged Auror?”  
  
Draco’s hands closed on his wand. He started to open them out of habit, to smooth away the signs of his anger, and then paused.   
  
Why  _should_ he have to? Honestly? He and Potter were being left alone in an unmonitored room, because the  _other_  Aurors trusted Draco to read Potter’s mind and find out whether he was quitting the Aurors because of a subtle Imperius or other spell, and they knew that the sensation of other people peering in might influence Draco’s Legilimency. Draco might still attract sidelong glances and whispers, but he had the foundations of some solid respect, at long last.  
  
And now he was going to suffer because Potter had decided to make a big deal of things and insult him again?  
  
 _No_.  
  
Draco leaned across and showed Potter the fist that he was making. “I’m here to find out what’s wrong with you because of my skills,” he said. “Not because we were rivals in school, not because of my age. You should know damn good and well that your decision to leave the Aurors was going to be questioned.”  
  
Potter lifted his head and fixed his eyes unerringly on Draco’s. His smile was small. “Not to the point that I thought someone would be sent to read my mind. Or do the Aurors do the same thing when someone decides that they want to switch to the Department for the Control and Regulation of Magical Creatures?”  
  
“Not everyone who makes that sort of decision is the Boy-Who-Lived,” Draco said, and had the pleasure of seeing Potter tense. He knew Potter hated the title. That wasn’t the point. “Come on, Potter. You know the way this works.”  
  
A second later, Draco stiffened, enraged to find that he had fallen into a cajoling tone with Potter when he wouldn’t have done it with anyone else. Yes,  _Draco_ knew how it worked, knew that he was assigned to this when he wouldn’t have been assigned to anyone else, but he had wanted to avoid it.  
  
Strangely, that cajoling tone seemed to be the one Potter needed. He sighed and leaned back, sprawling with his legs and arms open. “Look into my mind, then. You’re not going to find anything except what I’ve been telling everyone.”  
  
That was at least a better invitation than Draco had thought he would receive. Breaking into an unwilling mind was hell. Draco eased one of the chairs closer to Potter and sat, looking at him long enough that Potter shifted. Then Draco drew his wand and murmured the spell, maintaining his gaze all the time. Someone as experienced as Professor Snape could leap into reading someone’s mind with a moment of casual eye contact, but Draco needed the prolonged sort.  
  
He found himself rushing down the usual chaotic grey corridors that seemed to be the outskirts of everyone’s mind, except those of some skilled Occlumens. The corridors whirled and turned and calmed soon enough, something for which Draco was also grateful. It was  _also_ hell standing at the middle of a hub of whirling corridors and feeling as though you wanted to throw up.  
  
Draco tilted his head back. He saw the ceiling overhead that was the rippling undersurface of the memory, like water seen from an airy cavern. Draco reached out his hand and called the memory to him. He had heard Professor Snape describe this as another rushing flight into the thought, but that wasn’t what it was like for Draco. The water fell and splashed him, soaking him, running over and through his clothes, and he caught his breath and looked around, blinking.  
  
He found himself sitting in the middle of Professor Snape’s house, watching and listening as the professor explained that he had uncovered a cure for lycanthropy.  
  
Draco watched and listened, and looked at the expressions flitting over Potter’s face. He had come here for a purpose, and he would hold to it: to find out what this memory had to do with Potter’s decision to quit the Aurors.   
  
But he watched, too, the way that Professor Snape’s hands cut the air like glittering stars, and the way his mouth curled, and how Potter’s eyes sparked as he traced Snape’s motions, and how Potter watched him stalk back and forth, and didn’t press the mission that Draco knew the Aurors had sent him on.  
  
It was clear that Potter hadn’t only found a new career in that cottage in the forest.  
  
Draco’s stomach burned with something not so much different from acid as he opened his eyes again in the small bare room and found Potter staring at him. Draco didn’t care to read what lurked in those wide eyes and dropped jaw. Probably shock that Draco had read his mind and found the memory without taking his memories leaving him with a headache.  
  
He also knew that he had a rival.  
  
“You quit because you wanted to become a Healer,” said Draco, without much inflection in his voice. He turned his head away and studied the far wall, and waited until he could speak without spitting. “That’s—that’s the only reason?”  
  
“Not the only one,” Potter said. “But close enough.”  
  
His words seemed to echo strangely in Draco’s ears, with an edge of familiarity that he knew came only from his use of Legilimency. For a second, he felt as if he was Potter, back in that cottage, watching Professor Snape gesture expertly with emotions squirming and swimming around him that Draco hadn’t felt in years.  
  
And then he jerked his head back and broke the hold of Potter’s pitying eyes on him, and he was himself again.  
  
“I’ll tell the others,” he said, and started to stride out of the room. But the knowledge that, once again, no one was watching, made him pause. He could hear Potter breathing lightly behind him, as though he, like Draco, knew the confrontation wasn’t over, and that was really what made Draco turn around again.  
  
“You’re wrong,” Draco told Potter as bluntly and crudely as he could. “He isn’t ever going to want someone like you, and you can’t make a better impact in people’s lives as a Healer than you can as an Auror.”  
  
Potter’s eyes cooled at once. The edge of familiarity was gone from his words when he spoke again. “You don’t know that. Either of those things. And I’m going to try. There’s no reason not to.”  
  
 _There’s every reason!_  But Draco couldn’t say that without betraying too much about himself. He only shut his mouth and shook his head at Potter as if disgusted, and then tapped on the door and called out to the Aurors who waited on the opposite side. In a few seconds he was out again, and describing Potter’s motivations for quitting as “harmless” and “lack of job satisfaction” to the ones who asked.  
  
He didn’t think about what he had seen in Potter’s mind again. Or he tried not to. That was one thing Occlumency was good for, beyond the obvious uses of fending away someone else’s intrusion into his mind.  
  
He tried.  
  
But Occlumency was always less effective when used against one’s own questioning thoughts.  
  
*  
  
“Here.”  
  
Draco grimaced and opened his eyes. While Severus had been gentle enough that he had no pounding headache, he still gratefully reached for the glass of water held out to him. Legilimency performed by someone else on him always gave Draco a dry mouth and the feeling of his lips being coated in fuzz.  
  
“You didn’t return to the garden and set up a trap to try and kill Harry.”  
  
Draco kept sipping steadily at the water, and only ended the sipping when he had to look up and say, “No  _shit_.”  
  
“ _Language,_ Draco.”  
  
Draco opened his mouth with his throat aching and burning, and clamped it shut again when he saw the motionless expression on Severus’s face. He had to look away.  
  
“I can’t believe you still scold me for my language like I’m a teenager,” Draco whispered bitterly.  
  
“And I can’t believe that you still think of me as if I were a Hogwarts professor.”  
  
Draco flinched, and opened his mouth. But Severus shook his head and leaned in. “Did you think you could conceal that?”  
  
“I wasn’t trying to conceal that,” Draco said haltingly. “I didn’t think it mattered.”  
  
Severus studied him with a jaundiced eye, and then nodded. “Well, perhaps it does not.” He swept on again before Draco could demand to know what he meant. “As to what your signature was doing there, and what the mass of signatures means, you will have to use Legilimency on Harry. I think he’ll be willing to do it in a good cause.”  
  
“Like keeping himself alive,” Draco muttered, and downed more water.  
  
“There may be more than that,” said Severus, and then sighed. “I want you to promise me, Draco, that you will speak to Harry on a number of topics soon. One of them must be the Legilimency, of course. But his mind is in chaos concerning you. As you so wisely point out, he thought you might be guilty of murder and yet made no move to expose you to me immediately, or bind you in the garden and turn you over to your fellow Aurors. He has admitted to me that his feelings about you are not…settled.”  
  
Draco felt his eyes widen as something he had never expected to feel flared to life inside him. “Is he jealous?”  
  
“Of certain things,” said Severus, “yes.”  
  
He seemed to feel that he couldn’t speak more on the subject without betraying Potter’s confidence, but that didn’t matter a lot to Draco. He could feel the emotion spiraling through him, singing like a dozen birds.  
  
He had  _known_ Potter would be jealous someday. He had  _known_ that Potter might one day look at Draco’s accomplishments and feel a little ache.  
  
Even if Severus was right and it wasn’t exactly Draco’s term as an Auror he was jealous of, it was something. He might be jealous over Severus’s attraction to Draco. It didn’t  _matter_. What mattered, the only thing that did, was that the day Draco had been waiting for had come at last.  
  
“I need to talk to him  _now_ ,” Draco said.  
  
“He is with a patient now,” said Severus.  
  
“Then I need to talk to him as soon as he returns.” Draco stood and paced around the dining room. He could feel a strength burning through his limbs that he hadn’t even been aware he  _had_ , a thickness in his mouth that reminded him of coagulated saliva, and his eyes blazed within his head. “This is important, Severus. Really,” he added, when he turned around and met Severus’s skeptical gaze. “I’m not saying this to taunt him, or make fun of him for being jealous of me. This is maybe the most important conversation Potter and I are ever going to have.”  
  
From the way that Severus’s mouth tightened for a moment as he inclined his head, he agreed with that, even though he might not have wanted to.  
  
“I will let Harry know.”


	5. Part Five

Severus leaned back on the wall of his lab as Harry stepped into it and Draco met him near the door. He had suggested the lab as a better meeting place than Harry’s office—which Draco had wanted to enter when Harry’s meetings lasted into the evening—or the dining room, where Harry would want to eat and not talk.  
  
As it was, when Harry came through the door, he looked tired enough that Severus was sure he had no wish to argue. Perhaps a meal and a conversation with Draco in the morning would have been the best choice, after all.  
  
But on the other hand, Draco had insisted that they act before another murder could happen, and Severus had been forced to agree with that.   
  
“What is it?” Harry glanced at Severus first, and kept his eyes there even when Draco began to shift around impatiently. Severus resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He could almost see why Draco would accuse Harry of ignoring him on purpose.   
  
“Draco wishes to speak with you,” Severus said neutrally. “About matters related to the murders. He did not deliberately plant his magical signature at the site, and it must have occurred when he was there with other Aurors,” he added.  
  
Harry nodded and turned to face Draco. He looked like a solid block capable of bearing down any onslaught. There was a reason his patients instinctively trusted him, Severus thought. On the other hand, he knew Harry well enough to see the slight tremble in his hands before he concealed them.   
  
“I don’t know how you could suspect me of wanting to kill you,” Draco breathed. His gaze was locked on Harry as though nothing else of any importance existed in the world, and Severus moved slightly to the side. This revealed an angle on the situation that he had not thought existed. “I would never do that.”  
  
Harry coughed to clear his throat and said, “I didn’t think that you—I didn’t entertain the idea that you wanted to murder me seriously.”  
  
Draco nodded one too many times. “Good. Good. Then you’ll—you’ll let me read your mind and view the memory of the magical signatures?”  
  
“Yes.”   
  
Harry spoke with a pale face and another tremble of his hands that he promptly slid behind his back again. Draco didn’t notice, and Severus was honestly unsure if he would have noticed had someone shoved the evidence in his face. His eyes were too bright, too focused. He came a step forwards and put a hand on Harry’s arm.  
  
“Good,” he whispered.  
  
Harry’s eyes flickered like startled hummingbirds from Draco’s hand on his arm to Draco’s face. There was an awareness in them that made Severus nod, because it accorded with what he was beginning to think about. Draco desired Severus; he had known that for years, from direct testimony as well as his own observations.  
  
But jealousy, and the desperate wish for someone to notice one, was also a form of desire.  
  
 _Perhaps on Harry’s part as well as Draco’s,_ Severus thought, stepping back a subtle pace in order to get a better look at both their expressions. Draco crowded Harry a little into the wall. It was a move Harry had seemed to resent when other people did it, although he allowed Severus to get away with it. Perhaps it reminded him of being cornered by his fans.  
  
But now, he went with it, tilting his head back and doing nothing other than stare at the underside of Draco’s jaw.  
  
As though the gathering heat in the lab was not all Severus’s imagination, Draco abruptly hopped back a little and nodded. “Then come with me and let me use Legilimency on you,” he said. He threw Severus a sharp smile. “We probably shouldn’t do it here, just in case we knock something irreplaceable over.”  
  
“Oh, that hasn’t happened in, like, three days,” said Harry, and grinned a little at Severus’s reluctant smile.  
  
Draco blinked, probably at the casual tone. Severus only nodded, saying nothing. It would do Draco good to be reminded that Harry could get away with some things that Severus normally wouldn’t allow anyone, including shattering vials or messing up potions. He would be angry, but he would not abandon Harry afterwards, which he would have done to most others.  
  
“Right,” Draco said, and nodded. “Then come with me. I assume you have a private room where we can go and not be disturbed?”  
  
“Yes.” Harry almost sighed the word, in the second before he shook his head and brushed sharply past Severus and Draco alike.  
  
Severus cleared his throat as Draco turned after him. Draco tilted his head to the side to show he was listening.  
  
“Do not hurt him.”  
  
“Not on purpose,” Draco agreed, and closed the door of the lab after them.  
  
Severus sighed and began to prepare a Calming Draught, a potion so simple he had done it correctly when he was drunk, or injured, or half-asleep. He might as well do something productive with the racing emotions that wouldn’t have let him concentrate on the more complex potions on the schedule right now.  
  
He only hoped that the desire Draco and Harry might express towards each other was milder than the first time Draco had made it known to Severus that he wanted  _him_.  
  
*  
  
“I can’t do this. I  _can’t_ do this.”  
  
Severus stood back along the wall and watched Draco without moving. He knew how much weight had fallen on the teenager’s shoulders and would crush him if he didn’t balance it exactly right. The danger his family was in, the crimes he had committed since becoming a Death Eater, the harsh regard of the Dark Lord that forced Draco mostly into the role of torturer…those were terrible things.  
  
But Severus had also come to the limit of his ability to help Draco with those things. He had killed Dumbledore in the way that Narcissa had bound him to do, and the Dark Lord had rewarded him with the Headmastery of Hogwarts, which Severus was due to leave tomorrow to take up. He could not become the torturer in Draco’s place, or help him with his family. At best, he would make Draco look weak by comparison.  
  
“You have to help me.”  
  
That was another thing the boy had been saying for some hours. Severus dropped to a crouch in front of Draco, and waited until Draco stopped sobbing and focused wide eyes on him. Severus inclined his head slowly, giving Draco the respect of eye contact.  
  
“I can do no more,” he said. “Except encourage you to stand on your own and face down the Dark Lord with some grace and commitment.”  
  
“I can’t do that.”  
  
“Then you will more than likely die,” said Severus, and watched as  _that_ blow tore through Draco, making him flinch and curl away from Severus, wrapping his arms around his head as though to shield it from falling rocks. He gave a single dry sob.  
  
Severus waited a few moments. Draco didn’t respond or untwist. Severus finally murmured, “Do you think I  _enjoy_ doing this? Leaving you here like this?” He shook his head when he saw an eye appear under the curve of Draco’s elbow. “I do not. But there is nothing I can do without making the situation worse for you.”  
  
“You could take me and my parents out of here.”  
  
Severus laughed. He stopped, because the sound frightened even him. “And where? The Dark Lord would suspect me at once. I know no safe place beyond his reach. You would be tortured to death running from him rather than within the safety of your own home. Is  _that_ what you want?”  
  
Draco bit his lips savagely, not seeming to notice the small trickles of red that had begun to make their way down towards his chin. Severus conjured a handkerchief and offered it to him. Draco made no move to take it.  
  
“You could do something,” he whispered. “My mother is always going on about how you care for me, about how you care for your Slytherins. You  _could_ do something.”  
  
 _No wonder the boy is bitter. He thinks I am refusing simply out of fear of the inconvenience._  
  
But understanding the situation did not disperse Severus’s anger for once. He leaned closer and lowered his voice until it would burn and sting like secretly biting insects. “I took an Unbreakable Vow to help you with your task. I have done that. I am extending my protection over you while you are here as much as you can, by ‘idly’ threatening Death Eaters who have wanted to torture you. I had to fight a duel with Bellatrix only the other day because she took offense to the idea that I had more influence over you than she did, your own aunt.”  
  
Severus concealed a shudder. Bellatrix was a special case and had broken down laughing when Severus had managed to curse her with the Cruciatus. Then she had slapped Severus’s hand in camaraderie and gone away, the original cause of the argument lost in her flowing insanity. Severus would not have been so lucky had someone else taken an interest in Draco and his family.  
  
“Is  _that_ what it was about?” Draco’s voice soared, and Severus turned his head to let his eyes pierce Draco. Draco rolled over against the bare wall of the dueling room. “Severus…”  
  
“There is nothing else I can do,” Severus said. “The Unbreakable Vow would kill me if I broke one of its precepts, but the Dark Lord would do the same thing, and then you would have no protection either way.”  
  
“Is there something else you want?”  
  
Severus frowned, not understanding the question. “You are in no position to improve my standing among the Death Eaters.”  
  
“I mean,” Draco said, and his eyes were so hot and dry that Severus thought any second he would strike out at something and looked for his wand, “something else you want  _from_ me. Something I could do for you.”  
  
“You can make no bargain on your behalf that your mother has not already made,” Severus said, and he closed his eyes for a minute, all his thoughts turning upon a tower. “I have done what I said I should, and that shall be enough.”  
  
“Severus.”  
  
That was such a quiet breath that Severus knew he would have missed it if it hadn’t been right in front of him. He opened his eyes with a forbidding expression, and Draco leaned forwards and kissed him.  
  
For a moment, there was a fire between them, hovering like an invisible flame on their mouths. Or in one mouth. Severus leaned back to get a good look at Draco’s eyes and saw his eyes fixed hungrily, knowingly, on Severus’s face.  
  
It was not a look Severus could allow to endure. He reached out and gently took hold of Draco’s shoulder, pushing him down and back.  
  
“We shall not,” he said.  
  
Draco sat back, shivering all over like a wild thing called to hand. “But you wanted to,” he whispered.  
  
“I do not know what I want,” Severus said.  
  
“Yes, you do,” Draco said. “Or you would if you didn’t hold back and tell everyone around you that this is the best thing for them, and you’re the only one who knows, and you’re the best authority.”  
  
“I think you do not know what you are saying,” Severus murmured. It sounded like it, with the repetitive words Draco babbled. He started to rise to his feet. “Try to keep your head down, Draco. Do what he asks you to do. It is the best advice I can offer.”  
  
He turned to the door of the dueling room, and Draco tackled him around the waist. Severus exclaimed, throwing out his hands to jam them against the wall and hold himself away from it. Then he turned and drew his wand, grateful that Draco had grabbed his waist instead of his arm.  
  
It turned out that he didn’t need the wand, at least not in any traditional sense. Draco didn’t attack him with his fists or his magic. Instead, he sank to his knees and used his mouth, tearing at cloth near Severus’s groin with his teeth.  
  
For a second, there was heat hovering there, too, in a much more dangerous place than between two kissing mouths, and fantasies sprang to life inside Severus, because of course they would. He leaned his head back and gasped, feeling sweat trickle down the back of his neck. There was sweat all over his body, as a matter of fact, soaked arms and armpits and legs and feet and hands.  
  
And then he reached out and gripped Draco’s shoulder and held him there. Draco looked at him with eyes that were—not unafraid, Severus thought, carefully plucking his thoughts out of the melting morass. Rather, desire had eaten the fear, desire like hydrophobia. Draco was ready to bolt into danger with the same lack of concern as a rabid animal.  
  
“I meant that we  _shall_ not,” Severus whispered. “Not that we should not.”  
  
And Draco dropped back from him, and put his hands across his face, with another hollow sob.  
  
Severus shook his head. He felt as though various thoughts were bouncing around it, leaving no room for anything else with their insistent clangor. “Contact me when you can think of something besides your own plight,” he said, and turned, and left the room.  
  
This time, Draco didn’t follow, and Severus spent the downstairs journey through Malfoy Manor wondering if he should have pressed that much. The boy had some sincere desire at the bottom of all that fear and the desperate wish to find a protector. Or so Severus had assumed with a skimming of his surface thoughts.  
  
But at the moment, Severus had other things to worry about, and he could not be the protector of Draco Malfoy at all times. His stride lengthened, and by the time he reached the doors out of the Manor, his Death Eater mask was perfect once again.  
  
*  
  
 _I do not know how much that ever changed,_ Severus thought now, stepping back from the cauldron and looking down at the completed Calming Draught that glittered there.   
  
True, Draco was no longer in fear of his life; Severus thought part of the reason he had become an Auror was so that he would have the skills to defend himself if it ever came up again. But he was in fear, and he had never found someone who had become as close to him or as trusted as Severus had during that job.  
  
 _Do I want a lover, no matter how attractive, who will forever long for something that he can’t have, who will be checking on me to make sure that I don’t abandon him at every moment, who will be jealous of Harry partially because he thinks that Harry stands closer to me and more under my protection?_  
  
A second later, Severus’s lips quirked, and he was glad that he didn’t face the mirror he kept in the lab to help with some potions. The smile would have looked twisted.  
  
 _If I am being honest, I must say that a certain degree of dependency is in fact attractive. Not as much as Draco exhibits. But sometimes I think that Harry could stand to exhibit more._  
  
Severus shook his head and reached for the first vial he would decant the potion into. That only returned to his statement to Harry of how he would never have everything he wanted, and he was at peace with that.  
  
He would have to be. The situation was extremely unlikely to change.  
  
*  
  
“How are we going to do this?”  
  
Potter turned to face him across the guest bedroom, apparently the most private place in the house. Draco stalked towards him, feeling as though trapped lightning was leaping around his body. Potter’s hand dropped to his wand.  
  
Draco forced himself to pause and smile.  _At least that kept him from crossing his arms to keep me out._ “The same way that most people do it, Potter,” he said. “I’ll hold out my wand and say ‘Legilimens’ and then enter your mind. I trust that it won’t hurt that much because you’ll let me in. Won’t you?”  
  
He made his words as normal as possible, but Potter still narrowed his eyes the way he had during oh so many confrontations in the past. “What is it, Malfoy? You sound strange.”  
  
 _Maybe this does have to be done before I can read his mind._ Draco murmured softly, “I learned from Severus that you were jealous of me.”  
  
“Yes? What does that have to do with Legilimency or solving this case? There is a murder case you want to solve, remember, Malfoy?”  
  
Draco found that he could suppress the impulse to snap at Potter by taking a deep, long breath with his mouth open. Then he reached out and put a hand on Potter’s shoulder. Potter’s eyes widened, but he didn’t move away. Perhaps he thought this was something Draco had to do for the Legilimency.  
  
“Severus said that you were jealous of me,” he said.  
  
Potter winced as though someone had scraped a long splinter of steel down his spine, and Draco silently rejoiced. He hadn’t known how much he needed to see something like that, some  _acknowledgment_ that Potter was as affected by him as Draco was by Potter.  
  
But a second later, Potter said, “Yes. I know you have a bond with Severus that I can’t match. I told him that if he wanted to sleep with you, he could.” He turned his head a little to the side, although Draco, standing breathless with astonishment now, didn’t know what he was looking for. “He didn’t take me up on the offer.”  
  
“Of course not,” Draco said, and now his words were flowing faster than he could hold them back or monitor them, but from the way Potter snapped around to stare at him, that was all to the good. It was only honesty that would ever win him an audience with Potter, Draco was sure, and he could feel his skin flushing and his pulse becoming erratic. “Why would anyone just sneak off and sleep with someone, even someone he wanted, if he could have Harry Potter on the side?”  
  
Potter narrowed his eyes at him. “What are you talking about? That’s the exact deal I offered Severus.” Then he shook his head and moved away so that Draco’s hand fell from his shoulder. “Or are you thinking that I think I’m so handsome I don’t understand why someone would want anyone else?  _Sure_.”  
  
Draco heard a world of bitterness in that word and didn’t understand, but he didn’t think he had to understand. He leaned forwards and said, “I wasn’t talking about handsomeness. I was talking about having you, specifically.”  
  
Potter only studied him with squinted eyes and stayed silent. Draco was glad of that, because it let him go on talking. “Listen, Potter. How long do you think your affair with Severus would last, if he slept with me?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Potter said starkly. “But I thought it would end right now if he didn’t. That’s why I made the offer.”  
  
“No,” said Draco. “Severus isn’t one to do that, not once he made the commitment. And I—I didn’t suit him, any of the times I approached him before this.” It was weirdly freeing to admit that, maybe because he didn’t have to do it in the privacy of his own head. “Now, maybe I would.”  
  
“Then what are you waiting for?”  
  
Draco shook his head a little and reached out to shake Potter’s shoulder at the same time, ignoring the way it made Potter’s own head snap back and forth. “For you to realize that you’re always part of the equation, idiot.”  
  
“I’m  _what_?”  
  
“You were part of the reason that Severus refused me,” Draco said. Merlin, this was like letting someone lance a wound. What came out was disgusting, but once it went, then Draco would be free. “Even before you made your interest known to him. He was searching for someone who would fit him better. The ideal was always there.”  
  
“I don’t know what you’re saying.”  
  
“And now you’re his partner, and with him,” said Draco, babbling almost. “And  _I_ —Potter, I’ve felt entangled with you since our first day at Hogwarts. How did you think I was going to get away from that unscathed? That you wouldn’t matter to me?”  
  
“I thought I did matter to you. As an enemy. And I’ve had  _more_ than enough of mattering that way to someone!”  
  
From the way his eyes stared over Draco’s head, Draco knew exactly who he meant, and a shudder ran down his spine as it always did at the mention of the Dark Lord. But he said only, “You don’t matter to me as an enemy. You matter to me as someone I envied, and someone I would like to have been friends with, and someone who has talents I still admire.”   
  
That made Potter blink and blink again, and at last he said, slowly, “The way that I matter to you is as a rival.”  
  
“Yes,” Draco said, grateful that Potter had found the words for it, which he didn’t think he could have. He leaned in towards him and said softly, “If you had the slightest notion of how much time I spent thinking about you, then you would wonder if I wanted  _you_ , instead of Severus.”  
  
That made a blush flood Potter’s face, and Draco ducked his head. He  _knew_ he would laugh if he kept staring, and he didn’t want to. He wondered for a second if Potter had never been with anyone but Severus and if that was the reason he was reacting so strongly to someone declaring a simple interest.  
  
The thought made more than interest stir at the bottom of Draco’s throat and groin, but he had no intention of speaking aloud of  _those_ thoughts, either. He cleared his throat instead and murmured, “So that’s it. I don’t want to shoulder you aside. Now that I know you’re jealous of me, I want to know you better.”  
  
Potter eyed him sideways. “Why? I thought most people did prefer to forget the existence of their rivals.”  
  
“Not me,” said Draco. “The thing I hated the most was knowing that I thought about you all the time and you never thought about me at all. It grouped me with all those _other_ people you never thought about at all. The gossips. The fans. I wanted to be special and distinct, and now I find out that I was special and distinct to you all along.”  
  
Potter pulled further back. Draco let him. He knew, now, that Potter was definitely going to let Draco read his mind and do all the other things Draco wanted to, and that made him less impatient and irritated.  
  
“You’re strange, Malfoy,” Potter said at last. “If you don’t mind me saying so.”  
  
“It depends on the kind of strange,” Draco said. “If it makes me unforgettable, then I don’t mind.”  
  
Potter stared at him a little more, eyes traveling from Draco’s forehead to his lips. Draco didn’t think it was his imagination that Potter’s gaze lingered on his mouth more than anything else, and he was sure of it when he licked his lips in uncontrollable response and Potter stared at them, and his tongue.  
  
“I—I don’t know,” Potter said. “But fine. Go ahead and look at my memory of the overlapping magical signatures. It  _was_ the strangest thing I ever saw.” He leaned back and closed his eyes, taking a seat on the bed, in a way that Draco knew meant he was probably pulling the memory to the front of his mind. That would make things far easier for a Legilimens trying to find it.  
  
Easier, and far more impersonal. Draco took a step up to him and knelt down on the floor in front of him. Potter’s eyes popped open as Draco took his hand. Draco asked softly, feeling more adult than he ever had before, “May I go further into your mind? Look at the memory in its resting place among all your other memories?”  
  
Potter made a face at him like a sniffing rabbit. Draco knew it would probably be imprudent to betray how close he was to the edge of laughter. He waited instead. Potter finally nodded and let his hand stay in Draco’s as he drew his wand and murmured the spell.   
  
The surface of Potter’s eyes seemed to break like water around him, and for a moment, Draco whirled through more well-defined corridors than he had the last time he entered Potter’s thoughts. Severus’s influence, he thought, but he looked around and took more time to breathe than he had before.  
  
The walls and corners and nooks were tinted a shimmering blue-green, rather like Potter’s eyes in some lights. And now that Draco wasn’t trying to get in and then out as fast as he could, or as worried about what other Aurors would think of him for not succeeding, he realized that he could hear a distant hum in the background. Rather like the hum of Muggle machinery he had heard around some of the crime scenes, he thought.  
  
The negative association immediately darkened the blue-green around him. Draco swallowed and shook his head. No, he wouldn’t do this. He would remain uncommitted to one precise opinion, positive, open. He leaned forwards, thinking of that, and the corridors smoothed out around him again and the hum resumed.  
  
He could also think of it like merfolk singing to each other without words, Draco thought. His last case but one had involved sirens.  
  
He smiled slightly. Well, Potter had always had the ability to command his attention, sometimes almost compel it, the way that sirens could do with most of their victims.  
  
Draco strolled slowly forwards, his eyes turning from side to side. Now and then, he caught sight of what seemed like glittering watery globes, and he knew they were memories. He saw one in which his own face reflected, and he reached out and touched it.   
  
And he was slammed straight into the opening of one he would have preferred to forget: the one and only time that he and Potter had dueled at the behest of their Auror instructors.  
  
Knowing that Potter would sense his withdrawal, and having his own reasons to care about that now, Draco sat back and resigned himself to watching the memory play through, and comparing it with his own recollections of those moments.  
  
*  
  
“You understand that this is to stop the instant you see first blood?”  
  
Draco nodded at those words, because it was expected of him. But he had studied Crushing Curses and others that wouldn’t immediately send blood flying, and looking Potter in the eye, he had the impression that it was the same for him.  
  
Whoever had chosen to let this happen was at fault if Draco badly wounded Potter. Not Draco himself. They ought to have taken Draco seriously when he wrote down Potter’s name as someone he never wanted to be partnered with or work with or have to face in any way.  
  
Now, standing in the formal dueling circle—a ring of copper and gold set into the floor—in an oval-shaped dueling room not very different from the one at the Manor, Draco was glad that someone had chosen to ignore him. He was going to enjoy this so very much.  
  
“You may begin.”  
  
The butter-haired Auror, Julian Sandridge, had barely stepped back from the circle before Draco lunged forwards and shouted, “ _Contundo manus!_ ”  
  
Potter leaned backwards from that curse, his eyes never moving from Draco. Nor did he watch as the curse that would have crushed all the fingers in his wand hand shattered harmlessly against the barrier raised around the dueling ring to protect the spectators.  
  
It was infuriating, just how little reaction Potter  _did_ show. Draco chased him around the circle, shouting “ _Confringo ossum!_ ” and “ _Contundo pedem!_ ” and all sorts of other spells that should have caused Potter a lot of pain while not actually shedding blood. But Potter resisted them all, ducked them or blocked them or leaped over them. And he did it without looking at the spells once they had passed a certain distance in front of him. He looked at  _Draco_ the whole time.  
  
It was starting to creep Draco out more than a little.  
  
Then he shouted a spell that spread an invisible icy coating of water all over the floor, and Potter finally slipped. He spun around on the floor, his hands flattened. It didn’t do him any good, not when he couldn’t get a grip on anything that would actually stop the spinning.  
  
 _Now_. Draco charged at Potter, being careful not to slip on his own spell. He would use a crushing spell that would break the bones in Potter’s wand hand, the way he’d wanted to at first, and then he would use another that drew blood to fulfill the Aurors’ instructions and end the duel.  
  
Potter was only a short distance away. And then he lifted his wand and hissed out a spell so thick and low that Draco only realized later he did recognize the general shapes of the word. “ _Copula_.”   
  
A rope shot out from his wand, binding around Draco’s chest and arms before he had any time to stop or resist it. Draco struggled wildly, but none of the slicing charms he uttered in the heat of the moment had any effect, maybe because his wand was already aimed below the level where they would have done any good by the bonds themselves.  
  
Then Potter snapped his wrist, and Draco went sprawling. The rope began to retract into Potter’s wand in the next moment, pulling Draco with it.  
  
Draco didn’t even bother trying to resist the drag. He was seething, but he would only look worse if he expressed it aloud. He had done what he could, and Potter had managed to humiliate him in a way that would take all the sting out of what Draco had done to  _him_.  
  
Potter pulled him close enough to stare into his eyes. Draco stared back, watching for the moment when Potter would use some spell that didn’t shed blood to hurt  _him_  in turn.  
  
Potter leaned towards him. His eyes shone in a fashion that made Draco start. The glow actually appeared to come from  _inside_ Potter’s eyes, as if they were a cat’s shining in the dark.  
  
Draco knew powerful magic could occasionally do that. And he understood abruptly that what mattered wasn’t the relatively puny amount of power Potter had expended to lasso and pinion him. What mattered was how much he had, and could hold back.  
  
“I don’t care about hurting people,” Potter whispered. “Remember that. I care about winning.”  
  
And he used his wand to open a shallow cut on Draco’s cheek, and another minor spell to cut the rope. When he stood and turned to accept Auror Sandridge’s congratulations, it was with his back to Draco.  
  
Draco didn’t bother trying to get up until Sandridge came for him. He was burning and freezing both at once, too involved with his own rage to think about anything but Potter’s words and the glow in his eyes.  
  
The power there, and the way that Draco had once thought nothing could be more impressive than power itself.  
  
Now, he knew. The one thing more impressive was restraint.  
  
*  
  
Watching the memory from Potter’s perspective, Draco could see the way he flinched when the spells exploded near his head or his hands, or when he recognized them. He was breathing overtime when he finally fell and then used the rope spell that dragged Draco towards him.  
  
But he had managed to make Draco ignore those signals in the past. Draco was still impressed.  
  
He finally turned away from that memory and plunged back into the green-blue corridors of Potter’s general mind. He touched a few more memories that he flinched from—including the final battle with the Dark Lord—before he found what he wanted, and stepped into the garden as it had been from Potter’s perspective.  
  
Most of the time, memories only showed objective things, like words and gestures, that anyone could notice, but that was when they’d been collected in a Pensieve. This way, Draco could see what Potter had noticed because of his spells, and he could feel the emotions that saturated the air.  
  
There were so many magical signatures racing around and tangled about each other that it reminded Draco of the huge plates of spaghetti that the house-elves of Hogwarts had sometimes prepared. He wondered for a second how Potter had sorted Draco’s own signature out of that mess.  
  
Then he knew what had to be the answer, and smiled a little.  _Potter knows me. He pays more attention to me than I knew. Jealousy or something else, what does it matter? I stand out to him._  
  
He was still a little giddy with that realization. Draco cleared his mind with a concentrated meditation technique for a moment before he turned around and studied the signatures again.  
  
All of them blazed red, orange, or yellow, usually alternating colors along their lengths. Draco blinked. That was unusual. He had read about the colors that magical signatures could achieve, although he’d never seen them because spells that revealed them were extremely rare. Those combinations of colors meant the person casting the spell was tumbling between rage and terror and nausea. Draco knew that he’d been calm when he cast in the garden, and so had his fellow Aurors.  
  
 _Not that I would know which ones are theirs, either._  
  
Draco froze the memory in place and paced slowly around, taking time to pick up details that Potter probably couldn’t have. There’d been too little time between him casting the spell that revealed the magical signatures and getting caught in that trap.  
  
So many. So  _many_. Draco shook his head. There couldn’t have been this many killers, even if some of the killers were also Aurors he worked with. It looked as though hundreds of people had crowded into this garden to take turns torturing the Muggle to death. No, thousands.  
  
Then Draco paused. It  _looked_  as though there were hundreds or thousands. Also, it looked as if there was no pattern to the tangled mess, but now that he had walked over several of the twisting threads on the ground, he was convinced he had stepped over some of them before. As if the threads led from one central point.  
  
Draco twisted around, and saw what that point was. Potter stood in the middle of it.  
  
For one second, Draco thought he was bathed in the cold water of his own sweat, but then he shook his head. No. Potter couldn’t be the killer. Severus would have sensed it and done something about it before now, probably before the second murder had ever happened.  
  
But then what the magical signatures implied—  
  
Draco’s sudden realization was powerful enough to throw him out of Potter’s head, and he reeled. Potter caught his hands and stared into his eyes. “What’s the matter?” he asked.  
  
It felt good to have the anxiety in that voice focused on him. Draco concentrated on that, nodded a little, and said, “I think those signatures show there’s something out there pulling a little bit of magic from everyone who’s ever disliked you, or hated you, or feared you, or wished you would give them more attention. And that magic is lashing out and building up until the moment when it achieves critical mass and manages to attack you.”  
  
Potter blinked. “Then why attack random Muggles and wizards I haven’t ever met? And how can we stop it?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Draco admitted. He tilted his head down between his knees, and breathed.  
  
Potter’s hand came to rest on the curve of his neck, and stayed there, rubbing a little.  
  
Draco closed his eyes. He knew some people would say he was twisted, especially when he still had no idea how to stop more innocent people, or Potter, from being killed.  
  
But Potter’s touch made everything worth it.


	6. Part Six

“That is disturbing.”  
  
Harry wanted to snort when he heard Severus say that. Malfoy had explained it all—how there must be some magic or spell that had gathered up all the negative emotions from anyone who had ever wished harm on Harry and amplified them until they reached the point where they could reach out to harm Harry himself—in clearer terms than he had at first. He had poured out names of magical theorists Harry had never heard of, his face alight with passion, and at one point slammed his fist into the dining room table hard enough to make Harry jump.  
  
“It is,” Harry settled for saying. “What I want to know is, do we need to find the person who cast the original spell to stop the killings? Or not?”  
  
Severus and Malfoy turned and cast him oddly identical glances of pity. Harry locked his elbows into the tabletop. Years ago he would have retreated defensively, but you couldn’t do that and remain in a successful relationship with Severus Snape. He might be ignorant. Still, he’d asked a question that mattered.  
  
“There is most likely no original spellcaster,” Malfoy said. “You’re a person who arouses strong emotions, Potter, and you always have been. Those emotions need some place to go, and it’s not unknown for them to collect and gather like this.”  
  
Harry heaved a quick breath. He  _wasn’t_ stupid. He had formed a wrong conclusion through listening to Malfoy’s words, and that was something that they could just tolerate. “But the way you spoke, about it—them—needing practice before they lashed out—”  
  
“These kinds of magical ripples don’t need practice,” Severus interrupted. Harry turned away from Malfoy to listen to Severus. It might well be that Malfoy wasn’t rolling his eyes at how stupid Harry was, but Harry could barely stand to look at his face right now to find out. “They’re ripples from intense emotional events. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one began with your destruction of the Dark Lord.”  
  
Harry nodded slowly. “So they build like waves?”  
  
“Exactly.” That was Malfoy, leaning in from the side, his smile warm.  
  
Harry eyed him carefully and managed to nod and murmur his understanding.  _Wow. Malfoy is like—like someone lit a fire underneath him, ever since the moment when he found out I was jealous of him._  
  
Harry thought it was a weird way to decide you had a bond with someone, but hey. Whatever worked for Malfoy, he supposed.  
  
“Like waves, like water. That’s a useful way to think about them.” Malfoy leaned back, and his hands sketched back and forth through the air, attracting Harry’s gaze. “Think of all the ambient background magic of the wizarding world as a pool, lying there, waiting. Someone tosses a stone, and it hits the pool and sets up waves. Usually, by the time the ripples spread far away from the source, they’re weak and don’t affect anything. That’s why you don’t usually hear about magic like this attacking other people. Something might happen near the source, and that’s it.”  
  
Harry thought he could understand now. A bad taste coated his tongue. “So what you’re saying,” he murmured, “is that because so many people thought about my victory and—what, resented it?” He stared at Malfoy, wondering if it was true that part of him had resented Harry for surviving.  
  
Malfoy inclined his head. “We were all young once.”  
  
 _But some of us weren’t as dumb._ Harry would have said it, too, except that Severus glided in then. “Yes. They relived your victory and celebrated it in the papers and discussed it and focused their emotion on it in a way that would have happened rarely, if at all, with any other event. So the ripples built and built.”  
  
“But their choice of targets? And the silver band?” Those were the parts that Harry found it hardest to understand.  
  
“Ah.” Severus turned towards Malfoy. “Here, the Auror who has been handling the case will have to help.”  
  
“Well, we can’t find connections between all the victims,” Malfoy said briskly. “But your suggestion of looking to see how many had been treated by Mind-Healers was a good one. And even—what do you practice as, Potter? A psychologist?”  
  
Harry shrugged. “More or less. I’m uncomfortable with labels.”  
  
He got a single, searingly sardonic glance from Malfoy at that, but Malfoy shielded his eyes with a blink in the next second and said, “Yes. Well, the magic could trace connections like that. It was the profession you trained in and the profession you practiced. Certain people would have heard about it. Like me, for example. The magic would focus the emotions along certain lines, looking for someone to hurt. It found them.”  
  
“The silver bands?” Harry had to admit that this sounded reasonable to him so far, although he still didn’t know how much of the theory he would understand if Malfoy tried to explain it.  
  
“I don’t know about those yet,” said Malfoy, shaking his head. “We might not understand them until we examine the source of the ripple.”  
  
Harry paused. “What do you mean?” Malfoy hadn’t mentioned traveling anywhere. “Are we going to look at the site of the first murder?” That was the only thing he could think of.  
  
“No,” said Malfoy. “The source of your defeat of the Dark Lord. The  _true_ source of all the negative feelings about you,” he added, when Harry opened his mouth. “Or at least the most powerful.”  
  
“Do you think we’ll find something if we go to Hogwarts, then?” Harry asked doubtfully, turning to stare at Severus. Severus preserved a blank face, as he tended to do when he was trying to avoid influencing the discussion. “I mean, people hated me before that. And after that.”  
  
“Maybe. But I think this is the epicenter. We have to go to Hogwarts to determine if it really is.” Malfoy slid to his feet, eyes locked on Harry’s. “Will you come with me?”  
  
“I will,” said Harry, and glanced a question at Severus.  
  
Severus’s eyes were dark. Harry knew why. Although he had returned to Hogwarts to teach for a time after running his own Potions business for a number of years, the last time he’d left it was—under a cloud, to put it mildly.  
  
*  
  
“I have to insist, Severus. I’m sorry.”  
  
Harry paused and turned slowly around. He’d been leaving Severus’s quarters after one of his weekend visits. Minerva had turned a blind eye as long as they were discreet, which usually meant Harry had to be out of sight by Sunday evening.  
  
This time, though, Harry had stumbled straight into a conversation between Minerva and Severus, one in which she sounded so tired and guilty that Harry felt his curiosity piqued. He did his best to blend in with the wall.  
  
He watched Severus reach out and take what, from the shadow, looked like a piece of parchment. Severus and Minerva were standing around a corner, and Harry could only see bits and pieces of their elbows and robes. The torches casting shadows told him more.  
  
“I see,” said Severus. Flatly.  
  
“I am sorry,” said Minerva, and Harry thought that he saw her bowing her head. “But the Ministry is searching desperately for an excuse to interfere in Hogwarts. I can’t let them have this one.”  
  
“I quite understand.” Severus cleared his throat, then again. “Well. I knew this day might soon come. There have been more complaints lately from the parents of students I teach, about someone with the Dark Mark on his arm instructing them.”  
  
“There shouldn’t be a difference!” Minerva said passionately, and Harry leaned back a little. He had thought that she was on the Ministry’s side for a moment, even with the sorrow in her voice. “They agreed to forgive you! They agreed that you weren’t a danger. That they could forget what you did during the war—” She gasped and continued, “It  _disgusts_ me.”  
  
“I know,” said Severus. Listening as hard as he could for clues in a voice that was steadily more familiar, Harry couldn’t hear as much annoyance as he had thought he would. Or maybe Severus was simply resigned to the world turning against him, since people seemed to do it all the time, and for the smallest of reasons. “But I thought, when I heard about the new law they were passing on war reparations, that it might make an impact.”  
  
“Then why didn’t you  _warn_ me?”  
  
“Because I thought the impact would fall on other former Death Eaters,” Severus whispered. “Not me.”  
  
Harry slipped silently back into Severus’s quarters. Yes, he could hear some anger there after all, and he would wait to see if Severus needed him. But on the other hand, he had heard enough of what should be a private conversation. If Severus and Minerva wanted to say farewell to each other, they should be able to do so.  
  
Harry sat down on Severus’s bed and spent a moment staring at the rumpled blankets. Then he let himself slump back so he could look at the ceiling.  
  
He wasn’t worried about Severus’s financial future. He had plenty of money saved, he could return to brewing full-time, and he knew that Severus didn’t have the peculiar pride that would forbid him to take money from someone else, if it came to that. At least, as long as he trusted and loved that person.  
  
And Harry cherished the fact that he had managed to ascend to that position of trust. He wouldn’t lose it now.  
  
No, he was worried more for what would happen to Severus’s state of mind, and the peace he had struggled so hard to win after the war.  
  
“So you heard.”  
  
It never ceased to amaze Harry how Severus could draw conclusions like that simply from something like seeing Harry waiting in his room. But he knew it well enough not to be surprised by it, either. He rolled over and nodded silently.  
  
Severus shut the bedroom door behind him and sat down in the chair by the desk. Harry had woken up several times now, on the nights he spent here, to find Severus sitting there and scribbling restlessly on one of the seemingly random scrolls of parchment coiled on the desk. He said that his best ideas came to him when he was half-dreaming about potions or detentions. Harry would leave him to it.  
  
“Do you want to talk about it?” Harry asked.   
  
Severus turned his head by slow degrees to meet Harry’s eyes. “Do I even have the ability to mourn it?”  
  
“I  _think_  so,” Harry said slowly. “I mean, this wasn’t what you wanted to do for the rest of your life, but it’s unfair for you to be forced out simply because the Ministry is paranoid.”  
  
 _And, as usual, the Ministry isn’t going to punish the former Death Eaters who have the money to pay them off._ Harry had been a little sickened to see how easily some of the former Death Eaters who hadn’t committed any murders had been accepted back among the Ministry elite.  
  
Now that he thought about it, it was probably one of the reasons he hadn’t wanted to stay an Auror, although he hadn’t known himself well enough to say that when he left the training. He would have had to deal with those people all the time.  
  
“That is not—precisely what I meant to say. I used the wrong word.” Severus dragged his hand through his hair. “I meant, do I have the right to mourn? Should I not have known that this would end someday?’  
  
“You can think something’s going to end without expecting it to end in an unjust way.”  
  
Severus’s gaze came back from whatever distance it was focused on and landed on Harry, softening. “Yes. I like your perspective.”  
  
“It’s not one you would have thought of?”  
  
“You sound surprised.” Severus stood and made his way over to the bed, already undoing his robes. Harry, although he felt himself blush, leaned back and spread his legs in invitation. “But you seem convinced that Slytherins spend most of their time alive mourning how unfair things are, anyway.” Severus kissed his shoulder.  
  
“Not all of them. Some of them.” Harry’s mind flickered back to Malfoy and the last time he’d seen him, unable to comprehend even then that he and Harry were different and Harry wasn’t going to fall over in admiration of Malfoy’s skill. “You, sometimes.”  
  
Severus gave a breathless snort and stretched out beside him. Obedient to the implied command, Harry began to take off his robes.  
  
“I began to think somewhere along the seventh year of teaching that this was the price I deserved to pay,” Severus said, stretching his arms above his head and shrugging out of the robe only when Harry tapped his shoulder blade and made him raise up. “For letting Lily die, for becoming a Death Eater for even a short time, and all the rest of it. This suffering was my redemption.”  
  
“The seventh year you were teaching? You mean, even before Hermione and Ron and I got to Hogwarts?”  
  
“You always see things in term of your friends,” Severus murmured, but not as if he minded. “Yes. That was the way I felt.”  
  
“But you were still unpleasant and unfair to people.”  
  
“Redemption gives one rather a sense of superiority. You begin to think that you can do anything to anyone you like, because you are already suffering for crimes they know nothing about.”  
  
Harry laughed softly and said nothing more as he dragged the robes free and then rolled over to claim a kiss from Severus. What he said was true enough, and he and Harry had argued and agreed about those days, both. Harry hadn’t been content until Severus had apologized to Neville, particularly. He had been the one Severus picked on most.  
  
But for Harry, the real test had been seeing what Severus would do when it came to the students he’d taught at Hogwarts the second time around. And he had changed. He still permitted no one to use wands in his classroom and took away points from students who purposely did dangerous or stupid things around the potions, but this time, he did it from all Houses. And he didn’t sabotage people by attacking their character or making comments about them to their faces.   
  
Maybe his words on their essays were still savage. Harry wouldn’t know.  
  
For now, though, he did know that he enjoyed relaxing with Severus, his arms draped around Severus’s shoulders, his eyelids drooping as he sighed and the sweat on their bodies cooled. They had come a longer way than Harry could ever have imagined. That was what was important now.  
  
*  
  
“Here it is.”  
  
Harry looked around the Great Hall and sighed a little. It was the middle of the day, which meant students were attending classes instead of gathering around to gape at Harry, which Harry had been afraid of.  
  
But maybe it wouldn’t have been him. Maybe it would have been Severus, who some of them still remembered as a Potions professor. Or maybe it would have been the sight of a real life Auror stalking around the Great Hall in red robes. Harry had sort of faded out of sight in the last few years, being only a Healer and living mostly in the Muggle world.  
  
“You’re sure this will work.”  
  
McGonagall’s voice was low and skeptical. Harry flashed her a quick smile. But she looked more reassured by Malfoy’s soft, “We don’t know. It’s our best guess at the moment, and the only way I can think of to stop the murders.”  
  
“They must be stopped, of course.” McGonagall’s shoulders straightened under what looked like the burden of a Gryffindor’s righteousness. “There’s no question of that.”  
  
Harry smiled at her and turned around to contemplate the spot in the Great Hall where Voldemort had died. He’d expected to have trouble pinpointing it. It  _had_ been fourteen years.  
  
But no, surprisingly. The instant they’d walked in, his head had turned towards it, and he’d felt a pulsing wave of magic that broke against his senses.  
  
Harry tried to hide his shiver, and circled slowly towards the spot. He could see a few dark marks on the floor, but he was sure the original ones from the battle had to have been cleared up long ago.   
  
Malfoy pushed past him and knelt next to the spot, one hand held out as if he was testing the steam rising from a warm pool of water. He turned his head and focused on Harry with a keenness that made Harry grateful he wasn’t a criminal himself. “This is the place?”  
  
“Yes. How can I feel it? How can you? What kind of magical theory explains that?”   
  
McGonagall made a small confused noise behind him. Harry ignored that. They could explain later.   
  
“I can feel it because I was one of the people who had their emotions braided into this…we might as well call it a magical net, because that’s what it is.” Malfoy rose to his feet and prowled in another circle again. His eyes were still fixed on the place that Harry remembered Voldemort standing, so well. “As for why you can, you expended powerful emotions and magic here. Even just one of those can make a difference to someone’s ability to find a place afterwards.”  
  
“Oh. Well, is that any help in finding clues at the murder sites?”  
  
“It was right after the murders had first happened. The sensation fades quickly.”  
  
Harry snorted. He couldn’t help it. “But you want to tell me that this one still preserves the feeling here after  _fourteen years_?”  
  
Malfoy gave him a sharp smile. Severus touched Harry’s elbow, but Harry shrugged the hand off impatiently. Yes, he understood that Malfoy had been through a lot. What _mattered_ was that he said one thing and then he said another one that contradicted it.  
  
“Do you understand how much what you did here mattered to everybody in the wizarding world?” Malfoy asked, coming to a stop halfway around the circle he’d been pacing from Harry. He was gazing intently at the stone, but Harry thought he could raise his head any second. “It affected all of them, one way or the other. They might have rejoiced to see the Dark Lord dead. They might have wondered what was going to happen next. Maybe they didn’t know right away because they were on the run from Death Eaters and Snatchers, and someone had to track them down to tell them. But eventually, everyone knew. You were at the center of a moment that—I don’t think there are any equivalents to it in the cases I’ve studied, except maybe huge massacres. And most of those are centuries old and don’t have as much resonance as this.”  
  
He turned to Harry, and Harry found it even harder to glance away from Malfoy’s eyes than he had thought he would.   
  
“This is bloody  _unique_. Of course there would be people with negative emotions towards you because of it. And those emotions would have stirred up the magic of our world. And now they’ve had time to build.”  
  
“You still haven’t explained the silver bands on the victims’ arms.”  
  
Harry knew it was stupid to be concerned about that, that he was using the words like a clumsy hammer to smash the mood between him and Malfoy. But as far as he wanted it to, it worked. Malfoy blinked once and turned away with a small nod.  
  
“Yes. But in the meantime, I think you probably have to accept that this is the magical wave I said it was.”  
  
Harry nodded, wordless. Then he found his voice when McGonagall made a noise like clearing her throat behind him. “So how can we protect other people? How do we know that this magic won’t kill someone else before it comes for me?”  
  
“I  _did_ hope, Mr. Potter,” McGonagall muttered, “that you had learned, in the years since the war, to value your own life as well.”  
  
“I value it for him.”  
  
That was Severus, and Harry shook his head at him. He turned back in time to catch an odd expression on Malfoy’s face, but it didn’t seem as though it would interfere in the case, because he said, “There’s a spell I want to cast that would tell us more about the magical resonance here, but it’s rather disruptive.” He turned to McGonagall.  
  
McGonagall nodded at once. “I’ve used charms that should prevent any noise from getting out of this room. I’ve also instructed the other professors not to let any students come in early to lunch.”  
  
“Thank you,” said Malfoy, and drew his wand.  
  
Harry watched, turning a little towards Severus to use his height as a shelter. He didn’t know what kind of spell could make Malfoy look that grim, but he knew that he didn’t want to stand alone before it.  
  
*  
  
Draco crouched down before the spot of magical resonance that shrieked at him and placed his hand flat on the stone in front of him. If he breathed a little more slowly, in and out, and if he dropped his head until it was hard to see the place where his hand rested, and if he exhaled even more slowly, he would get into the right mindset for performing this spell.  
  
And he did. The cloak fell over his thoughts first, muting them and making it impossible for them to harm him. Then Draco felt his senses contracting in the same way. He could no longer hear Severus or Potter shuffling their feet or coughing or muttering to each other. There was only the distant hum of magic.  
  
Old magic. Ancient magic.  
  
Draco drew his wand in a circle around him. He said no words, but he didn’t have to. His will rose from the silent well inside him, and that was enough. The stone around him began to blaze red.  
  
He didn’t draw the circle behind him. There had to be one place that was left open.   
  
Then Draco braced both palms on the stone and began to chant the spell under his breath. His voice would rise until he was shouting the words eventually, but it had to start off as a whisper.  
  
 _And then rise._ Draco tried not to think about how many other things would rise at the same time.  
  
The magic swept around him, leading even his voice in the same direction as Draco had drawn the circle at first. He heard breathing from another pair of lungs at the same time, chanting in another voice.  
  
When he lifted his head, Draco met the eyes of a replica of himself, crouched on the stone in front of him. There was another circle around him, and another stretch of Great Hall that technically didn’t exist but reflected the one immediately behind Draco, as if he was facing a mirror.  
  
Draco nodded to the image without stopping his chant, and the image nodded back. Draco spared a moment to hope that the others had moved out of the way. This was going to be messy if they hadn’t.  
  
“ _Sum pars retis. Sum pars retis. Sum pars retis. Sum pars retis. Sum pars retis. Sum pars retis…_ ”  
  
The image leaned forwards until Draco was sure that he would try to kiss Draco on the lips. That wasn’t supposed to happen, wasn’t supposed to be part of the spell, but Draco tried to ignore that and keep chanting.   
  
In the end, the image did what it was supposed to. When Draco’s throat was hoarse with the chant, it leaned in and turned into a small, wavering blur of color. The color passed between Draco’s lips and into his lungs, and the circle around Draco blew up into a net of sparks that covered him and the air around him like pictures of an intricate set of runes.  
  
Draco looked wildly around, his chest heaving with the power and his eyes picking out rune after rune. Yes, he could see—there were many emotions he recognized, many glowing strands of the net he could trace back to specific people if he just had enough time—  
  
But he didn’t have enough time. He had only the limited amount of time that the spell would actually last. He lashed his hand out and made the last gesture, the wand-movement that completed the magic.  
  
He flew away from his body and into the net, bouncing from strand to strand, as the spell carefully pared down his mind to the one essential image he needed to see.  
  
*  
  
Draco huddled against his parents as he watched Potter duel the Dark Lord. His father’s grasp on his shoulder was so tight that Draco worried he’d break the bone.  
  
But broken bones wouldn’t matter if the Dark Lord won. Draco knew that, and part of him strained towards the contest happening in front of him, trying to add strength to Potter’s defense, trying to make believe that Potter would use  _something_ other than a simple Disarming spell on the most powerful wizard of all time.  
  
Potter seemed too confident, just prancing around like that in front of the Dark Lord and voicing a lot of slop Draco had never heard before. Draco’s mouth stung with the pace of his breathing. He wanted to turn around and bury his head in his mother’s shoulder, the way he would have done when he was a child and had a nightmare, but he couldn’t turn away from this duel, no matter how disastrous it was.  
  
Potter abruptly shouted “ _Expelliarmus!_ ” at the same time as the Dark Lord shouted, “ _Avada Kedavra!_ ”  
  
There was a monstrous collision of green and gold and red and other colors of magic that Draco couldn’t see through. He tucked a protective hand around his face, moaning. The power fried his skin and made him feel like he had a sunburn. He could feel his mother surging to her feet, ready to drag him further away.  
  
But then the magic died away, and there was so much shouting that Draco knew Potter must have won. No one would be shouting if the Dark Lord had won, but keeping still like rabbits in the grass, in fear that he would turn around and  _look_ at them.  
  
Draco lowered his hand and looked. He saw the smear of greasy ashes that was all that was left of the Dark Lord. He saw Potter in the embrace of his friends, his face shining with the kind of triumph that Draco knew  _he_ would never feel.  
  
Because along with the rush of relief that came from knowing he and his parents would survive, that the Dark Lord wouldn’t get to kill them after all, came a deeper, darker rush that made him shudder. He also knew things would  _change_ because Potter had won. There would be much less respect for the Malfoy name. There would be prison sentences for his father and maybe for him. There would be a change so profound that Draco winced from imagining it.  
  
And at that moment, staring at the face of the boy whose life had defined his for so many years, in one way or another, Draco didn’t try to stop the resentment that rose from within him. It was dark and hot as the breath of a beast down his neck, but what did that matter, anyway? No one else was ever going to know about it.  
  
It couldn’t affect Potter, in his little charmed circle.  
  
*  
  
Draco lifted back out of the memory like a dolphin leaping. And then he wasn’t leaping, he was tipping over on the stone and panting roughly as he felt the air dragging in and out of his lungs.  
  
“Malfoy!”  
  
Potter sounded as if he was lunging towards Draco. Well, Draco could only hope that Severus would hold him back. It would be disastrous for everyone involved if Potter crossed the border of Draco’s circle now.  
  
Draco stood up, still within the confines of the spell. It felt as if he’d hit his head when he fell, but that might have been only the power he was working with. Well, he had what he’d needed, and that meant he could end things.   
  
He snapped his hand out and closed his fingers into a fist. “ _Sum pars retis!_ ” he repeated one more time, and the runes of colors and emotions began to dance around him again. Draco nodded once, then added, “ _Sum as retis!_ ”  
  
The wand movement he had to make was a snap of his wand down until it was parallel to the floor. It seemed to take forever to make the motion. His wand pressed against invisible, gelatinous barriers, and Draco swore under his breath as he saw the colors of the spell fading. He had only this one chance, more than likely, to make himself the center of the web of resentment and anger and hatred against Potter instead of only one small part. By the time he cast another enchantment to see the web again, it would have changed and flowed on. He would have to spend more time entering another memory that had contributed to this murderous magic.  
  
 _I can do this. I can._ He pressed his hand down and down. The web was wavering to a stop now, and Draco felt as if he was standing up to his waist in warm water. Some of it was slowing down his wand movements. Some of it was starting up a wave that would roll towards him and soak him.  
  
He didn’t want to know what would happen when the wave arrived.  
  
But then he didn’t have to. His wand was in position, and Draco repeated, “ _Sum as retis!_ ” as loudly as he could.  
  
There was an incredible wrench, as if the whole piece of the world where he stood had clicked sideways. Draco opened his eyes and saw red and yellow everywhere, drifting, circling, spinning colors. The only difference was that now they circled  _him_.  
  
And he could end them.  
  
Draco folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes. There was only one problem with this solution to ending a magical wave of emotion, which Draco had read about but never seen performed. He had to reach past his own hatred and other feelings that had contributed to this web and find something  _positive_ about Potter.  
  
And the emotions were difficult to come up with. Long seconds passed in which Draco could feel sweat start to life everywhere on his body and his heart labored and the magic swirled in towards him but also drifted outwards.  
  
 _It’ll start again. The murders. If I can’t control this._  
  
And then Draco thought of the way that Potter had let him into his mind the other day, how the walls of Legilimency had parted for him, and the different perspective he’d gained from watching his duel among the Aurors with Potter. At least half of Draco’s resentment had always come from the idea that Potter was laughing at him behind his back and thought he was a target for mockery.  
  
But the most important thing about that duel, at least for Potter, had been that he wanted to end it. And he hadn’t mocked Draco. Even when he must have been able to feel how stunned Draco was to see such a different perspective on the duel.   
  
Draco held onto that, that warm pearl of obsession and what might have been grudging admiration in a different universe, and breathed on it. It shone. It flickered.  
  
It built up into a burning fire in his palm.  
  
“ _Non sum retis!_ ”  
  
The web around him ruptured abruptly, the long strands of envy and dislike and worry and rage spinning away from each other. Draco lifted his hand and sucked them into the warm pearl of his reality in his hand.  
  
He looked up and held Potter’s eyes. They widened, but Potter seemed to understand instinctively how important this was, and he didn’t move. He only widened his eyes and let Draco do what he needed to do, staring into the face of the living man who had done more than anyone else to save the wizarding world.  
  
 _And that’s the important thing. Not what I felt at the time. Not what I’m going to feel when this is done and over with. Not the jealousy I feel because Potter became first with Severus in the way I couldn’t._  
  
Draco let the warmth go on building until it felt as if it would start cooking his arm. Then he tossed the pearl into the air and drew his wand in the same moment. The enchanted sight the spell had brought him was fading. He knew he would have to cast the next spell, the one that destroyed the pearl, now, or he would lose sight of it and it would land somewhere else, to become the epicenter of a new web of hatred and murder.  
  
“ _Abest!_ ”  
  
The word ripped out of him along with the needed power, and the wand seemed to pull  _his_ arm after it instead of the other way around. Draco tucked his other arm around his head and fell back before the burning wave of invisible radiance that struck him. He could feel something he hadn’t even realized was still tethered to him fading away, fractured, gone.  
  
And then there was silence in the Great Hall. It lasted until Draco heard footsteps coming towards him. He lifted his head and blinked.  
  
Potter leaned over, placed a hand on Draco’s shoulder, and smiled. Severus did the same thing from the other side.  
  
McGonagall cleared her throat a little. “That was—remarkable, Mr. Malfoy.”  
  
“Wasn’t it?” Draco muttered drowsily. At the moment, he was more than content to curl up and let someone else take care of the aftermath. There might be frightened students or flustered professors, and there were ethical questions about the nature of what he had just done—another rarely used set of spells, because it would have tugged on and changed the emotions and magic of everyone involved in the web—that he would probably have to answer before other Aurors later.  
  
But not now. For now, Draco passed into the half-swoon, half-trance that using so much powerful magic naturally brought him, and there were only two sensations that he cared to keep track of.  
  
One supporting hand on the one side, and one on the other.


	7. Part Seven

“Hello,” Harry said, stepping around Malfoy a little as he came into the kitchen, because Malfoy was eating a bowl of porridge standing up and showed no sign of moving. “What are you doing here?”  
  
Malfoy glanced up. There was a level of pallor to his face that Harry couldn’t remember seeing even when he was describing how much the murders had baffled the Aurors. Harry shut up and went to get his own breakfast, but he watched Malfoy cautiously over his shoulder.  
  
“Eating,” Malfoy said, and swallowed once more before dumping the mostly-empty bowl on the table. Harry rolled his eyes and used his wand to send it to the sink.  
  
“Yes, but why here rather than your own flat?”  
  
“I assumed I was welcome here.” Malfoy snatched an apple from the bowl in the center of the counter and started to tear at it ferociously.  
  
“You are.” Harry turned his back, though, because the last thing he had time to do today was play guessing games with Malfoy.  
  
There was silence for a few seconds as Harry sliced bananas for himself and Malfoy murdered the apple. Then Malfoy sighed and admitted, “We still don’t know exactly what the bands of silver in the case mean.”  
  
Harry turned around. “Are you being blamed for that?” He’d thought Malfoy wouldn’t be, after what Severus had told him about how much respect Malfoy had among the Aurors, but he didn’t know that much, after all.  
  
Malfoy shook his head and swallowed one more bite before tossing the apple into the bin. “They simply want no loose ends. This case is full of them. No original spellcaster, no person they can arrest and tell the families that there’s someone who’s going to Azkaban…”  
  
“They  _believe_ you, though? They have to!”  
  
“They believe me. They just find it unsatisfying. And sometimes people like to come up and talk to me during breakfast if I try to eat it in my office. I’d rather be here.” Malfoy snatched a slice of Harry’s banana next.  
  
Harry watched him, not trying to say anything. He supposed he could understand, but all it reminded him of was how glad he had been to leave Auror training behind.  
  
“I expected quiet, though,” Malfoy added, looking at him. “Not a welcome.”  
  
Harry sneered to himself. Any sympathy showed to Malfoy was just an invitation for an insult, wasn’t it? “I won’t say anything else,” he said, and turned back to gathering the slices of banana so he could roast them over a small fire. “Then you can go and do whatever you needed to.”  
  
Malfoy’s hand caught his arm. Harry hastily levitated the dish with the banana pieces higher so that it wouldn’t get burned from the bottom and turned around to glare. “I’m trying to make breakfast—”  
  
He lost his breath. Malfoy was leaning closer to him, staring into Harry’s eyes as if he wanted to know what color they were. But that excuse didn’t work for him, Harry thought, struggling to keep his balance.  _Everyone knows what bloody color my eyes are._  
  
“I came here because I  _wanted_ quiet,” Malfoy said, when the air between them had become so heated with the reflex of their own breaths that Harry was stiffening his muscles in anticipation of a duel. “But I’ll  _take_ a welcome.”  
  
Harry swallowed. Malfoy had said that and then not moved away, which made Harry think something else was coming. “What is this, Malfoy?” he asked, stirring a hand between their chests.  
  
“Whatever you want it to be.”  
  
“That’s not an answer.”  
  
“Hmm. Then maybe I’ll make the first move and you can tell me if it’s something you like.”  
  
Before Harry could say anything, Malfoy had leaned nearer and covered Harry’s mouth with his own, jaws open as if Harry was another apple he was going to devour.  
  
Harry actually thrashed like someone was holding his hands down before he got hold of himself. Then he knew it was up to him. He could stand there and let Malfoy keep kissing him, lips scraping across his and tongue darting out teasingly, or he could shove him away, or he could shove him away  _and_ yell for Severus.  
  
His curiosity was greater than anything else, and he wanted to see what would happen. So he opened his mouth.  
  
Malfoy grunted in shock and tripped forwards as if he’d been counting on Harry’s lips to balance him. Smiling, Harry caught his shoulders and turned him, and kept kissing him, feeling the heat of his mouth, the taste, the slipperiness as Malfoy pulled his tongue back and Harry tried intruding his own.  
  
“Can anyone join this?”  
  
Severus had entered the kitchen, then. Harry leaned back without speaking, and felt Severus’s arms encircle his waist for a minute, before he leaned past Harry and kissed Malfoy in turn. His cheek clipped Harry’s cheek, which only made Harry chuckle a little more and pull his head back further. Malfoy’s eyes were still wide, his eyelashes fluttering, but he let Severus kiss him, tilting his head further back and back.  
  
“Yes, I think,” Severus said at last.  
  
 _In response to a question no one asked,_ Harry thought at first, but he was wiser than that. He turned around and looked at Malfoy, out of breath and with one hand clutching the kitchen counter as if he would never let go again.  
  
“Why?” Harry asked quietly.  
  
*  
  
 _Because you’re irresistible._  
  
But Draco knew saying something like that would destroy his chance of being with Potter and Severus. Perhaps not Severus alone, but that wasn’t what Draco wanted now. And he’d had enough of sabotaging himself.  
  
“Because I realized that you were jealous of me,” he murmured, pulling himself up and away from the kitchen counter, but not away from Severus or Potter. Severus’s gaze was too intense to meet right now. Draco contented himself with turning to Potter. “You weren’t—inhuman. Unattainable. So high above me that I might as well not even try.”  
  
“I was  _never_ that.”  
  
“But I’m talking about the way I thought about you. I thought for years that you were better than me and I was jealous and you wouldn’t even look at me or acknowledge me.” Draco raised a hand when Potter’s mouth started to open. “I’m talking about what I thought, not what was true.”  
  
Potter closed his mouth and nodded slowly.   
  
“So now I know that you’re not. You’re—like me. I don’t have to stand around being jealous and never thinking Severus is going to look at me because he has someone so much better.” Draco deliberately leaned back so that Potter grabbed his shoulder to keep him from crashing to the floor. Draco sighed and closed his eyes, luxuriating in that touch. “Because you’re both within reach.”  
  
“But I don’t understand how this works.” Potter’s voice was subdued. “Do you want me to leave the house so that you and Severus can be alone, then? Or—do we—go first?”  
  
Draco opened his eyes and traded a glance with Severus. He silently asked with his eyebrows whether Severus wanted to be the one to explain, and Severus inclined his head and took up the challenge. Perhaps for the best, since he knew Potter better, Draco thought, leaning back again.  
  
“Not take turns,” Severus murmured, his fingers stroking through Potter’s hair for a moment before he moved them on to Draco’s. Draco tilted his head forwards and closed his eyes. He’d once tried to get Pansy to do this for him, and then house-elves. Neither had worked. “Both at once.”  
  
“Oh. He—wants that?”  
  
“I’m here, and can speak for myself,” Draco said, turning his head. “Yes. It was always the case with Severus. With you, it took longer. But I never thought you were ugly. Just impossible to be with.”  
  
“Because ugliness is the  _prime_  consideration?”  
  
“If I thought you were ugly,” Draco insisted, leaning forwards, “I wouldn’t be here at all.”  
  
Potter smiled at that, unbelievably. Draco didn’t see what was so funny. It was only the truth. And Potter would probably be more upset if Draco lied.  
  
“Beauty is not the prime consideration for Harry,” said Severus, with a faint smile in Potter’s direction. Draco cocked his head and thought about speaking the name “Harry” in a context that didn’t involve suspects called that or him bitterly spitting about his schoolboy acquaintances at someone who’d asked. Yes, maybe he could do that. “As you can see by his choice of me.”  
  
“You’re ridiculous,” Potter—Harry—hissed, twisting backwards and kissing Severus in the same motion.  
  
Draco watched them, and felt as though—as though someone had stopped hitting him who had been hitting him for a long time, maybe. Where before he would only have thought about how it should be him there instead, now he could think there should be him there  _too_.  
  
“Not as ridiculous as you are, in your naiveté,” said Severus patiently, when their lips had parted again. He turned slightly to the side, so he was holding Harry and Harry was holding Draco and none of them were in danger of slumping to the floor. “Now. I suggest we take this out of the kitchen. It is one of the less comfortable rooms in the house to be doing this in.”  
  
Harry’s face turned as red as a fireball at those last words. Draco blinked and tried to imagine what it would have been like, the apparently inevitable time that Harry and Severus had done this in the kitchen.  
  
But he couldn’t imagine; there were too many possibilities, making the facets of his mind open up in too many different directions. And besides, his breath was getting short with the desire to try them himself.  
  
*  
  
There had been years when Severus had warned himself against indulging too much in desire. He had wanted to be powerful and in control; he had joined the Death Eaters. He had wanted Lily back; he had driven her further away. He had desired acknowledgement after the war; he had it, but not in a form that contented him ninety percent of the time.  
  
Now, though, there was only pure desire, and he was enjoying himself.  
  
Harry didn’t seem to know how to undress Draco, so Severus did it for him. Then Harry sat off to the side and stared while Draco lay back and spread his legs and Severus conjured enough lube to overflow his hand like a waterfall. A little amused, Severus moved his head at Harry, and he jumped and scrambled over to sit beside Draco, cupping his hip.  
  
Severus couldn’t blame him for being hesitant. As far as he knew, he was still Harry’s only sexual partner. And Harry had made the choice to come to Severus purely of his own will, as opposed to being swept along the way he is now.  
  
“I am going to enter his arse, because I want to,” Severus said. He watched Harry jump and flush, and added, “Do you wish to watch only, the first time? I would not blame you.”   
  
He was thinking of Harry as he had been, a virgin, but that was seven years ago. This Harry was one who turned a steadily more brilliant red, but lifted his eyes to Severus’s face and said, “No. I want to—touch him. I want to—do something while you’re fucking him.”  
  
Severus wished he could recover quickly from the effect of that word on him, but he could not. Not quickly enough, at least, to put in his voice before Draco’s drawling one said, “I think I’d like it if you’d suck me, Harry. You know. That way, I could fill your mouth the way I always wanted to.”  
  
“Dreamed about choking me with your cock a lot, did you, Malfoy?” Harry’s eyes were narrowed and focused, but Severus thought that better than nervous.  
  
“No,” said Draco. “I thought about getting you to shut up. But this is better than anything else I dreamed of.”  
  
Severus, watching with a sense of satisfaction, saw how Harry’s eyes widened. Perhaps it was just Draco’s blunt admission. Perhaps it was the audible catch in Draco’s breath. But Harry nodded and sat back to watch Severus undress Draco.  
  
Severus remembered the drunken confession Draco had given him one night when he’d showed up at Severus’s house and Severus had been unable to make him leave for several hours. Apparently, Draco had detailed fantasies not only about shutting Harry up but about the order in which he wanted Severus to take off his clothes. And Severus had finally let him stay in order not to Splinch himself if he tried to leave, and had had to go to bed with those words echoing in his ears.  
  
If he were not so determined to make Draco say those words sober, he might have tried to act on them in the morning. Of course, Draco had been  _gone_ then.  
  
Now, eyes locked on Draco’s, Severus lifted his robes up a little and drew his nails down Draco’s chest. Draco stared at him, and Severus dipped briefly into his mind, knowing the intrusion wouldn’t be resented.  
  
Draco hadn’t known Severus remembered his little confession, although the words had remained burned into Draco’s own memories. With a small, malicious smile, Severus set about making them a reality.  
  
He would never have done this with Harry. Harry had needed wisdom and gentleness the first time, and even the strength they’d showed each other afterwards had been shown in full knowledge of what lay underneath. But with Draco, there was an element of being able to do exactly as he wished, because  _Draco_ would wish it also.  
  
Gentleness could come later.  
  
After the scratches on Draco’s chest came the rough squeezing on his collarbone and shoulders, as Severus took the robe off over his head. Then he twisted the collar to the side and let it give just the  _promise_  of choking Draco before he finished the motion and removed the robes altogether. Draco was breathing as though he’d run a race by then, and when the robe was gone, he pulled Severus down and kissed him, hectic and fierce.  
  
He rolled to the side in the next second, so fast that he almost tugged Severus with him, and kissed Harry. Harry kissed back, a speculative gleam in his eyes as he looked at Severus.  
  
Severus smiled a little. It seemed he was not the only one to be discovering new pleasures today.  
  
*  
  
Betrayal. Bewilderment. Shock. Anger. Hurt.  
  
Harry knew those were possibilities for things he could feel as he watched Severus have his way with Malfoy. But he didn’t feel them. There was lust, a lot of lust, and surprise. And he wanted to see what would happen.  
  
Maybe it wasn’t love, the way it had been his first time with Severus. But on the other hand, he wasn’t the man he had been then, either, any more than Malfoy was the boy he had been at Hogwarts, or the man Harry had first dueled or who had ripped through his mind on Auror orders when he left the Ministry.  
  
It was time to figure out  _who_ he was.   
  
Someone who enjoyed this, he knew. Harry felt the warmth melting through his body, flooding his fingers. He reached out and toyed with Malfoy’s bare hip, and felt Malfoy shudder as Severus clawed at him again.  
  
It wasn’t the kind of thing Harry had ever liked or thought he would like. But he found that he  _was_ enjoying watching the red lines of scratches sprout on Malfoy’s pale skin. And when Severus removed his pants and Harry could see Malfoy’s cock springing up, he reached out and touched it.   
  
Malfoy convulsed with shock beneath him. Harry blinked, then grinned. He thought he knew a little of what Malfoy had been experiencing now, when he said it made him feel better to find out that Harry had been jealous. It made Harry feel pretty good to know he could affect Malfoy like that.  
  
Harry didn’t bend down and lick Malfoy’s cock, not yet. He toyed back and forth with it, and felt the continual shocks that leaped from his hand through Malfoy’s body. Severus had never done that.  
  
Severus was less responsive.  
  
Harry waited until Malfoy was focused away from him, on Severus, as Severus smeared lube around his entrance and hissed instructions at him that Harry didn’t bother listening to. He thought he knew what Severus was saying, and it was worth listening to, but it wouldn’t be  _for_ him. Then he bent down and finally licked a stripe up the side of Malfoy’s cock to see what would happen.  
  
An actual yelp, and an apparent attempt to levitate off the bed without a wand. Harry laughed aloud and helped Severus hold Malfoy down.  
  
Malfoy turned and glared at him. Harry waited. If Malfoy thought Harry was laughing at him, that would be bad, but not irreparable.  
  
But instead, Malfoy muttered something that sounded like “Ridiculous,” and turned his head haughtily away. Severus promptly kissed him. Harry waited a second, then bent down and kissed the tip of Malfoy’s cock, too.  
  
Malfoy twitched. Harry didn’t think he could help it. Then he reached out with a fumbling hand and caught Harry’s fingers.  
  
Harry snatched his hand and kissed it, too. Then he reached down and urged Malfoy to hold himself, murmuring encouragement when Malfoy seemed as if he would reach for Harry again instead.  
  
Malfoy tried to say something. Harry shook his head and muttered, “This time, I want to make you feel good. Maybe next time?”  
  
Malfoy’s mouth was filled with Severus’s tongue in the next instant. But he looked Harry in the eye and nodded.  
  
Harry grinned and bent down. He was going to find out how someone besides Severus tasted for the first time. He couldn’t wait.  
  
*  
  
Draco felt as though his mind had leaped off a cliff and forgotten to tell his body. Or maybe it was the other way around.  
  
Because he could feel the slow, steady slide of Severus’s cock into him, and himself clenching hard around it, and at the same moment he could feel Harry’s tongue sliding slowly up his erection.  
  
This wasn’t a dream. He had never dreamed anything like this. This was intense,  _real_ , heat slamming into him, and pleasure a second later.  
  
Draco did lift a hand from the bed and reach for some kind of hold, some anchor that would tie him to this reality. He’d been aiming for Severus’s hair, but ended up with his shoulder instead. And then there was Harry’s head, moving under his arm, bobbing determinedly up and down.  
  
Draco groped. He could feel Harry’s hair—he wanted to hold skin—  
  
And then Harry lifted his head and winked at him, and Draco’s hand slid away, and Severus struck so hard inside him that Draco rolled away from Harry almost convulsing.  
  
He found himself staring up into Severus’s eyes as Severus lifted his hips and pushed into Draco’s body again. Draco grunted in response. It felt—it felt beyond anything he’d ever felt before. There was sex, and there was this.  
  
“Remember this,” Severus whispered to him, harshly enough that Draco shuddered all over in response. “I would not want to do it again merely to teach you where you belong with me.” And then he closed his eyes, and his face went red, and he  _thrust_.  
  
That was the best one of all. Draco tried to show him that by clawing at Severus’s sides, but again his hands would never stay in one place. And then Harry bent down and sucked at him again, and  _nothing_ was in one place. Draco was soaring, falling, wheeling in places that made both darkness and stars explode behind his eyes.  
  
He blinked, and he was still lying in the bed, of course. But that was what it had felt like.  
  
“Draco? Can you hear me?”  
  
“Were you worried about me?” Draco pinched his lips at Severus and fluttered his eyelashes. Severus stared down at him, grunting slightly, his hips shifting gently. It thrilled Draco that even when he was concerned about him, Severus couldn’t completely keep from moving.  
  
“I have no wish to face a murder charge when I could not even name the weapon I used in polite company.”  
  
Draco laughed, and the sound seemed to unknot a lot of things in his chest and pour them out. Then he sighed, because Severus had gone back to thrusting and Harry was still sucking, although he pulled his head free every now and then to breathe. “I’m  _fine_. More than fine. I thought you knew that.”  
  
“Not right at that moment,” Severus muttered, but he once again began to fuck Draco with more than enough strength. Draco lay back dizzily and considered Severus, how often he had seemed like a tower wall against the Death Eaters, and how he had sworn an Unbreakable Vow  _just_ to protect Draco, and especially about how they had survived and come through the war and ought to have done this a long time ago.  
  
Harry sucked again, and Draco’s thoughts spun and rattled. He tensed.  
  
“Already?” Severus asked, and how  _dare_ he sound smug. Draco knew how to get back at him, though, knew as though they had been lovers for years. He waited until Severus had started to redden even further and close his eyes, and then he squeezed down with his inner muscles. He tried not to thrust too deeply into Harry’s throat at the same time.  
  
Harry gagged anyway. But that was nothing against the rush of victory that drowned Draco when Severus’s eyes flew open with a surprised grunt and he stopped moving for a second. Then the next second, his movements started again, almost vicious.  
  
Harry had to pull back and use his hand on Draco instead. That didn’t bother Draco. Merlin, he was almost spent, and he hadn’t even  _come_ yet. He lay back with his head shaking a little with the motion of the bed and gasped.  
  
In the end, he wasn’t sure who gave him that last pleasure, Harry or Severus, hand or hips or cock. He only knew it was there, and it was better than he’d imagined, better than he’d hoped, spinning him around once again without letting him move. He sighed and heard Severus sigh, and turned his head a little towards Harry.  
  
Harry was stroking himself, kneeling there on the bed. Draco couldn’t see him because of the angle his own hips were at, though, and his head on the pillow. He cleared his throat a little. Severus looked up from where he was chasing his own pleasure, his eyes sharp despite the right they’d have to be hazed.  
  
“I don’t think—” Draco battled to get the words out. “We should let Harry come on his own. Should we?”  
  
*  
  
 _He’s serious about using Harry’s name, then. I am pleased._  
  
In truth, of course, Severus was pleased about so many things right then that it was hard to distinguish between them. But he cleared his throat and nodded and managed to do what he had thought was impossible a short time ago: hold off his climax. He drew his wand, and Harry pulled his hand back and eyed him, a little surprised.  
  
Severus realized with a small jolt that Harry was still dressed, although he’d undone his Muggle trousers to reach his cock. He smiled at Harry, and Harry didn’t smile back. He only narrowed his eyes and craned his head to the side instead.  
  
“Severus, I  _swear,_ if you do that—”  
  
“What will you do, then?” Severus breathed, and reached out with one hand, dropping his wand on the bed again. God, he was going to lose his balance and fall over on Draco, and that was going to embarrass him more than anything he’d done so far. “Draw your wand and curse me? Try to fuck me when you’re so close to coming that I can  _smell_ it?”  
  
Draco was shaking with silent laughter below Severus. He only hoped that Harry hadn’t noticed it, or Severus might have a greater tax to pay than he wished to.   
  
“ _This_ ,” Harry said, and did what Severus had hoped he would, shoving forwards until his cock rested against Severus’s palm.  
  
Severus curled his hand around him and stroked, long, loose motions. Meanwhile, his hips were pumping faster and faster, and he had to give up the notion of Harry coming before him as his hips jerked and he hunched forwards, hand dropping for a second.  
  
Harry was incredibly impatient, which of course he was, since he was  _Harry_. He leaned across the bed and rubbed his cock against Severus’s arm. Severus felt the wetness there at the same moment as he felt himself pushing it into Draco, and Severus sighed out and let himself fall on the bed. It wasn’t so terrible, now. At least he had made both of them come.  
  
He turned his head and met Harry’s eyes with a look that he suspected was drunken with happiness, because Harry laughed and shoved him. “You look ridiculous.”  
  
“But happy,” Severus murmured. He was normally never this exhausted after sex with Harry. Nevertheless, he felt himself drifting away, and couldn’t even regret the potions that he wouldn’t be able to brew today.  
  
“I need to go,” Harry said, sounding enormously reluctant. “I have appointments this morning.” But before he dragged himself out of bed, he bent down and kissed Severus on the forehead. Severus lay, watching from beneath mostly-lowered eyelids by now, for what would happen next.  
  
And it happened. Harry turned, hesitated, and bent over Draco, kissing his forehead, too. Draco managed to make his hand stir and swiped it along Harry’s arm. “Stay,” he whispered.  
  
“Later,” Harry whispered back, which Severus thought was one of the most hopeful words he’d ever heard, and strode out, already tidying up his clothes and hair and groin with easy swipes of his wand.  
  
 _I want to stay awake. I want to see what happens next.  
_  
But apparently, all that happened next was sleep.  
  
*  
  
“Thank you for seeing my daughter, Mr. Potter. Mercy, come here,” added Alton, fussily, tugging her back towards him.  
  
Mercy looked at Harry for a second, then ducked her head. Harry smiled at her. He didn’t think, from what Alton had told him about her, that she was normally this shy. But maybe she felt the magic in the air, the same way Harry had done when he was a child and around other wizards without knowing it.  
  
 _All the little people who bowed to me or vanished around the corner the next instant. I don’t want Mercy to have to grow up wondering, or have her parents think she’s crazy or lying._ And with her father under Harry’s care, Mercy might think she was crazy more easily than other kids were.  
  
“Hello, Mercy,” Harry said, holding out his hand. “My name is Harry Potter.”  
  
Mercy looked up at him, shook his hand, then said, “I remember your eyes.”  
  
“You never saw Mr. Potter before, Mercy, don’t be silly—”  
  
Harry raised one hand to calm Alton down, not looking away from Mercy. “What do you mean?”  
  
It seemed that having him ask that question in a calm tone, instead of an upset one, gave the little girl courage. Mercy straightened her spine and answered like they were two adults meeting over a business lunch. Or at least teenagers, Harry thought, concealing his smile. “I mean I dreamed of your eyes. And you were in a dark place and you fell in front of a beam of green light. It was the same color as your eyes. Then you got back up again.” She hesitated. “I have a lot of strange dreams. I don’t want to remember all of them. But I like remembering that one.”  
  
Harry smiled slowly. A Muggleborn witch, without a doubt. And possibly a Seer. He was glad that students at Hogwarts didn’t take Divination until their third year, though. The last thing Mercy needed was Trelawney getting hold of her when she was still really young and impressionable.  
  
“I think things like that can happen,” Harry agreed calmly. He sent a mild charm at Alton that made him cough and stand up.   
  
“Have to run to the loo. You two going to be okay by yourselves?” He glanced back and forth between Harry and his daughter as though he thought they were going to start fighting.  
  
“Of course, Daddy.”  
  
“Yes,” Harry said, and waited until Alton had walked out of the room before he turned to Mercy.  
  
She had questions ready on the tip of her tongue, though. “Can you do the things I do? You feel like it. What  _are_ they? Who are you? Can you make my daddy better?”  
  
“I’m going to try to help him. And it’s called magic. We’re wizards, you and I. Well, I’m a wizard and you’re a witch. Watch.”  
  
Harry flicked his wand and made a soft bubble of light come off the end of it and dance around the room, a variant of the basic  _Lumos_ Charm. Mercy watched with her mouth open, the light shining in her brown eyes. Then she whipped around to face Harry.  
  
“When will I be able to do that? How come you have a wand? How come I can see you in my dreams?”  
  
Harry laughed and did his best to answer the questions. He had already made another decision, too, and he didn’t put away his wand when Alton came back from the bathroom. Alton paused in the doorway with his eyes wide and his hands slowly forming into fists by his sides.  
  
“This it. I’ve gone mad, and they’re going to haul me away and lock me up with all the other blokes who’ve gone mental.”  
  
“No,” said Harry, with a faint smile. “You just need to learn more about the truth, and then that will give you a foundation to build on that  _will_ defeat the ghosts in your mind. I promise, Alton,” he added, when his patient hesitated, looking more resentful and confused than ever. “Your daughter and you need to go into this new reality together. You’ll have company.”  
  
Alton swallowed and glanced at Mercy. Harry thought maybe the happy expression on her face finally convinced him that this wasn’t a lie or a bad thing, because he walked further into the office and collapsed back into his chair, shaking his head.  
  
“Right. What  _are_ you?”  
  
“He’s a wizard!”  
  
Harry grinned and explained again, while Alton apparently tried not to look like he was putting his head in his hands, and the ball of light drifted gently around them all. Harry felt a warm contentment in his stomach as he spoke. This was a new beginning, and Harry had always valued them.  
  
And that made him more prone, when he came home, to accept other new beginnings.  
  
*  
  
“You don’t often cook, I take it,” said Draco, leaning back in his chair and admiring the stunned look on Harry’s face as he stared around the kitchen. “Why? It’s not as though you don’t know how to.”  
  
“Because it takes time away from potions.”  
  
Draco smiled, and concealed the smile behind a full plate Severus handed him. Of course that was the reason.  
  
And there was  _so much_ to eat. Severus had baked a loaf of bread that sprawled almost the length of the table. There was fresh fruit, with berries piled as high in baskets as apples would reach, and wheels of cheese that Draco had never tasted before but resolved to have the house-elves in the Manor learn how to make, or purchase. And there were so many  _liquids_ , probably modified potions. Draco didn’t care about that, though. They tasted like oranges and rose petals and made his lips tingle with their fizz. They could stay.  
  
When the mounds of food had sunk enough that they could see each other across them, Severus leaned forwards, with his elbows serenely on the table, and told Harry, “We were thinking of having Draco staying with us.”  
  
“Well, yes,” said Harry, swallowing around a ragged chunk of peach that Draco thought was a little too big for him. At least, his voice sounded choked. “I was thinking you would think that.”  
  
Draco exchanged a look with Severus and then turned to Harry. “You don’t understand.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
Draco shook his head. “No, you  _still_ don’t. I wasn’t thinking of moving in, or at least not right away. I have the Manor to keep up, and it’s a hard thing to do. And anyway, I know as well as you do that you and Severus have a separate, special life that I don’t want to intrude into. It would take time to get me integrated into. I know that.”  
  
“Then I want to know what you’re proposing.”  
  
“That sometimes Draco would join us,” Severus said. “For meals. In bed, if you wished to. Or was what we did this morning something you wished to do only once?”  
  
Draco tightened his hand on his fork. He wanted to say that Harry seemed to have liked it more than that, and he wanted—he wanted more than Severus, honestly. He wanted to touch Harry and learn how he laughed and see what they had been missing for years, behind all the jealousy and resentment.  
  
But more than that, he wanted Harry to make the decision. Of course Draco knew what choice he hoped for, but there was simply no way to make it  _for_  Harry.  
  
“I—I wouldn’t be opposed to  _trying_  again. It’s just, it sounded settled.”  
  
 _And he thought that we’d already made his decision. Without him,_ Draco completed in his mind.  _Of course he would be upset._ He shook his head a little and smiled at Harry across the table. “Listen, Harry. This whole thing is a process of trying. I don’t even know how tolerable we’ll be around each other when it comes to fitting into the Muggle world, or whether you’ll find me tolerable when I’m not working on a case. What I want to do is try. Not say good-bye and then resume our separate lives.”  
  
Harry’s expression was remote. Draco started to speak again, and Severus reached out and put a hand on his. Draco shut up.  
  
“I could  _try_ ,” Harry finally finished. “Like I said, as long as it’s not settled.”  
  
Severus, not Draco, was the one to snort, although Draco didn’t know if he felt the same flash of fierce joy in his chest that Draco did. “Settled? Things are a long way from settled between us. And I hope they will never be completely so.” He stood up and held out one hand to Draco and one to Harry. “Come. Let us go into the drawing room and discuss it further.”  
  
Draco smiled, and felt the joy leap and flash into flame.  
  
*  
  
Severus leaned back in his chair and watched Harry and Draco for a moment, discussing matters with each other on the other side of the room. Some things they had to say were private, Severus knew. There were tensions there that he might know all about, from private, separate confessions, but they weren’t his to settle. He would simply have to wait.  
  
Harry finally nodded and said, “Then we’ll try,” and faced Severus. “You know it’s not completely the end of the case? They still haven’t learned the reason for the silver bands. It might be an old deposit of silver under Hogwarts, for all they know. Or something to do with the symbolism of tarnishing. Or just the way the emotional magic ended up playing out. Emotional magic like the kind that was stalking me hasn’t been studied all that much, you know. Some of it might manifest as silver.”  
  
Severus could have lectured him on what was known and not known about emotional magic; it tied into Occlumency. But he was more than content to nod and ask, “So that gives a reason for Draco to continue with us, if anyone asks? He’s still looking into the case, into that one aspect.”  
  
Draco nodded eagerly, but Harry was the one who said, “No.”  
  
Severus felt as though all of the pivoting emotions in the room had turned and were about to fall on Harry. “What do you mean?” he asked neutrally. Harry knew what he was  _doing,_ Severus hoped.   
  
“I mean—it’s a reason for Draco to come and speak to us, and I hope we’ll find out the truth someday.” Harry was flushed. “But—I don’t want to hide the truth if anyone asks us. We’re trying things out, and seeing what works. If my friends want to know what’s going on, that’s what I’m going to tell them.”  
  
Severus thought for a minute. He had no hesitation for himself, but for Harry, who had suffered sometimes from their world’s—one of their worlds’—desire to have definite names for him and what he did. “There might be people more upset by that than the most shocking combination of bodies,” he said, in warning. “Uncertainly makes most people uncomfortable.”  
  
“It makes  _me_ uncomfortable. But I think something greater can come out of it, and I want to see—what happens. And people I don’t know can sod off, and people I do know can ask.”  
  
Draco was gazing at Harry adoringly as he said that, and Severus concealed a smile that would have been the wrong kind behind his cup. He nodded. “Then I have no problem saying that. All of my remaining friends have other things to be concerned about.” He looked at Draco. “Will that cost you respect with the Aurors?”  
  
“I have respect there. Colleagues—not friends. I’ll tell them the truth if they ask me, the same way as Harry.” Draco shrugged. “And I’ll go on solving cases incredibly well, and they won’t be able to shrug me off that way.”  
  
“Good. Draco.”  
  
Severus smiled one more time at the expression on Draco’s face when Harry said his first name, and added, “Then I see no reason not to try.”  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
